Physicians, part one

The Wellcome Library has entitled this etching as "Physician Arguing with A Patient." Doesn't he look snobbish?  You can see the patient is a wealthy person, of such financial resources that she is able to afford a physician.  (Source: Wellcome Library, London)

“The practice of physick in London and seven miles round, being for near two hundred years settled by law, wholly in the College of Physicians in London … [but] they come to enjoy so small a part of it [the business and profit of practicing medicine]. Chymists and distillers, astrologers and mountebanks, midwives and nurses, and the whole train of broken-tradesmen doctors have everyone their share. There are not a few [patients] that are their own doctors, and practice upon themselves; and there is hardly any one so unkind, as not to recommend to his sick friend what has done himself good. The College can only blame these last for indiscretion: And the former are the most of them hardly worth the charge of prosecution; yet the College have been ever and anon making an example of one or other of them, to strike terror into the rest.” – The College of Physicians.
In other words, the physicians ought to treat everybody, according to the physicians. After all, they had 14 years of education at Oxford or Cambridge and could study Hippocrates and Galen in ancient Greek and Latin. (Hippocrates and Galen were known as the fathers of Western Medicine. Hippocrates lived 460-370 BC and Galen 129-about 200 AD.) The pharmacists, known as apothecaries, only served a 7 year apprenticeship.
However, in 1700 there were only 60-80 physicians in London, serving over 500,000 Londoners. The apothecaries numbered 1,000. There weren’t enough physicians, they were expensive, and they didn’t seem to be able to cure more successfully than anyone else. Although they talked a good talk, as quoted above, they were mostly thought of as quacks who catered to the rich. To be fair, people didn’t consult them until patients were very ill, so the ill person could have been beyond hope the first time they ever saw a physician.
(Waller, 82-83.)