Physicians, part three

A physician and a surgeon doing their respective work -- the physician is checking a vial of urine and the surgeon is "bleeding" the patient while his assistant is ready with the bleeding bowl. (Source: Wellcome Library, London.)

To counteract their bad reputations (earned when a lot of them had deserted London during the 1665 plague), one group set up what we would call a low cost health clinic, which they called a public dispensary.

“That the physicians might clear themselves of this false charge, they have been obliged to set their care of the poor more in the eyes of the world than heretofore; not only giving advice gratis to the poor at their own and the patients lodgings, but appointing public dispensaries also for the poor to resort to every day of the week (except Sundays) where they may both have the best advice gratis, and also proper medicines, for their respective cases at the lowest value; whereby the poor are at once delivered from the danger of the apothecaries ignorance in practice, and alos from the oppressive charge of their medicines.” – The Necessity and Usefulness of the Dispensaries Lately Set Up by the College of Physicians in London for the Use of the Sick Poor.
(Waller, 84-85.)

 However, Wesley and the Methodists did the same thing. He set up two clinics in 1746 – one at his home base the Foundery, and one in Bristol – that dispensed both advice and remedies for free. Regarding the Foundery clinic, he wrote, “I found there had been about six hundred [patients] in about six months. More than three hundred of these came twice or thrice, and we saw no more of them. About twenty of those who had constantly attended did not seem better or worse. Above two hundred were sensibly better, and fifty-one thoroughly cured.” (Wesley, John, “Journal,” quoted in Rogal, Samuel. “Pills for the Poor: John Wesley’s Primitive Physick” in The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 51 (1978), 81-90, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2595647/, accessed 16 September 2012.)

More next time on the other branches of health care – apothecaries and barber-surgeons.