Page:Medical jurisprudence (IA medicaljurisprud03pari).pdf/363

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being admitted a member of the body be matter of election, it is immaterial whether the bye-laws be good or bad. It seems to me that the insufficiency of the provisions of the statute 3 Hen. 8. probably gave rise to this charter; the object of which was to establish a better mode of determining who were proper persons to be licensed to practise physic, and to prevent the practice of ignorant empirics; and if so, it was not necessary that all men of the faculty should be members of the body. All that was necessary was that it should be composed of a sufficient number of learned and discrete practisers of physic, who should have a power of continuing the succession in such persons as themselves, and that they should license proper persons and restrain unfit persons from the practice of it. If this were the object, is it natural to construe the charter as giving a right to all men of the faculty to become members of this body, when the charter speaks of men of the faculty in a sense contradistinguished from the members of the body; or to suppose that the Crown meant to incorporate all, when the charter was made for the government of some, who, if all were incorporated, could not exist? It is admitted that there were two distinct classes under the charter, and according to Dr. Stanger's construction one class, that of the governed, would be extinguished. Another mode of construing the charter in the argument was by considering the words omnes homines ejudem facultatis to mean the individual members of the corporation: but if so, there would be no power given to make bye-laws to affect the licentiates; and the clause in the charter that gives the exemption from serving on juries speaks of the person exercising the faculty as contradistinguished from the members of the college; "nec presidens nec aliquis de collegio prædicto medicorum, nec successores sui, nec eorum aliquis exercens facultatem illam." Therefore it seems to me that the homines facultatis are not the individual members of the college. Then it was said that there might be some persons who might not choose to become corporators, and that this would make a