Complaining against Medical Practice and Practitioners: The Patient View, 1830s-1900

The nature of the relationship between a doctor and his middling and aristocratic patients in the nineteenth century is now well-established. In a medical market where cure was often elusive the role and aspiration of the doctor was as much socio-cultural as medical. Moneyed patients with plenty of choice and the knowledge and desire to execute it demanded prompt personal and written attention, easy financial terms and (notwithstanding a wider sense of the disappearance of the patient narrative) an active role in what modern medical professionals would label a care package. 1Local Medical Societies helped to create a collective identity amongst doctors and a wider movement to professionalisation after the early nineteenth century gave energy to the identification and confrontation of otherness (quacks, irregular practitioners, female practitioners), though it was not until the later nineteenth century that the need for formal qualifications and the professional oversight of doctoring activity reached a par with that exercised by and over the apothecaries since 1815. 2 Against this backdrop, a false step or an inability to play the holistic role of the doctor led either to a failure to get established or to socio-economic ruin. [First Paragraph]