5
ing to the custom of other European nations, were incorporated with the barbers;" but before this official incorporation it is clear that they possessed some sort of corporate existence, for certain officials called "the kirkmaister and brother of the surgeanias and barbouris" appeared before the Council to support their petition. In 1681, the physicians of Edinburgh, who had long been aiming at incorporation, received from Charles the Second a charter constituting them the Royal College.
We know, unfortunately, very little as to how the practitioners of these early days received their education. The surgeons learned their work by the system of apprenticeship. Those who wished to join the craft being apprenticed to a member of the guild, whose practice he watched, and with whom, like other apprentices, he lived in family. But their class education must have been very deficient. Although the teaching of anatomy was contemplated from the time of the incorporation of the surgeons, it must have been very inadequately performed, for, in the year 1671, a skeleton of a Frenchman brought from Paris was regarded here as a very great curiosity. It is described in a catalogue of rare and valuable articles belonging to the University as being "neatly and cleanly done, and covered with a white sheet, and wants three teeth above and four below, and the forefinger or joint of the right hand is dropt off. He hangs in a very convenient oblong box of timber, which, opening with three doors, exposes all parts of him to view."[1] Thus, more than a century and a-half after the charter was granted to the surgeons, there can have been scarcely any opportunity for the real study of anatomy. Home-bred physicians must have derived much of their knowledge from seeing the practice and receiving the oral instructions of their seniors, though perhaps they, like other physicians of their time, thought more of mastering the dicta of Hippocrates and Galen than of observing disease for themselves.
The fact that wealthy Scots sought to secure the services of foreign physicians, that sometimes they went abroad in order to consult individual practitioners, and that in one instance a rich Archbishop of St. Andrews called, for consultation, a physician from beyond the Alps, shows that the repute of
- ↑ "Lonsdale's Life of Knox" p. 51.
