OF THE RIGHT TO PRACTISE MEDICINE AND SURGERY.
LEGAL DEFINITION AND HISTORY OF THE TERMS PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON.
AT common law the right to administer drugs or medicines or to perform
surgical operations was free to all. And such was the rule of the
Roman civil law. But the importance of prescribing certain educational
qualifications for those who made such practices their means of gaining
a livelihood soon became apparent, and as early as the year 1422,
during the reign of Henry the Fifth in England, an act of Parliament
was adopted forbidding any one, under a penalty of both fine and
imprisonment, from “using the mysterie of fysyck unless he hath studied
it in some university and is at least a batchellor of science.”
As a result of this and other statutory regulations, a class of
professional men grew up, who were called “physicians,” because they
professed to have the qualifications required by such legal regulations
to wisely prescribe drugs and medicines for the cure of diseases.
A chirurgeon or surgeon—Latin, chirurgus; Greek, _χειρουργος_,
compounded of _χειρ_, the hand, and _ἐργειν_, to work—as the
derivation of the word shows, was one who professed to cure disease or
injuries by manual treatment and appliances.
It would be more interesting than profitable to trace the history
of these terms, and of the professions of medicine and surgery from
the early times, when the clergy administered healing to the body as
well as to the soul, and when barbers were generally surgeons, and
blood-letting by the knife-blade and the use of leeches caused the
common application of the term “leech” to those who practised surgery.
_Definition._—For the purposes of this treatise, however, it will
be sufficient to define the term “physician,” as meaning any one who
professes to have the qualifications required by law to practise
the administration of drugs and medicines, and the term “surgeon,”
as meaning any one who professes to have the like qualifications to
perform surgical operations, for the cure of the sick or injured.
For a list of the early statutes of England relating to the practice of
medicine the reader may consult Ordronaux’ “Jurisprudence of Medicine,”
p. 5, note 2.
The present statutory regulations throughout the United States and in
England and Canada will be more particularly referred to and synopsized
hereafter in this volume.