CHAPTER I.
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.