The Growth of Specialization
A brief review of the development of the modern medical profession will help put
our present position in perspective. The profession as we know it has existed only
since the nineteenth century. Before that time, society was served by a variety of
healers, only a small proportion of whom were physicians. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, physicians were a small and elite group of learned men, educated
in the few universities. They practiced in towns among the rich and infl uential,
did not perform surgery or dispense drugs, and did not associate, either
professionally or socially, with the craftsmen and tradesmen who ministered to
the medical needs of poorer and rural people. Surgeons were craftsmen who were
trained by apprenticeship; apothecaries were tradesmen who originally dispensed