How unimpaired his practical judgment of men and affairs was at the time he made his change from royal physician to simple priest can best be gathered from the sagacity displayed in the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians, an institution he was endowing with the {81} wealth he had accumulated in some twenty years of most lucrative medical practice. The Royal College of Physicians represents the first attempt to secure the regulation of the practice of medicine in England, and, thanks to its founder's wonderful foresight and practical wisdom, it remains down to our own day, under its original constitution, one of the most effective and highly honored of British scientific foundations. No distinction is more sought at the present time by young British medical men, or by American or even Continental graduates in medicine, than the privilege of adding to their names the letters "F.R.C.P.(Eng.)," Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of England. The College worked the reformation of medical practice in England, and its methods have proved the suggestive formulae for many another such institution and for laws that all over the world protect, to some extent at least, the public from quacks and charlatans. Linacre's change of profession at the end of his life has been a fruitful source of conjecture and misconception on the part of his biographers. Few of them seem to be able to appreciate the fact, common enough in the history of the Church, that a man may, even when well on in years, give up everything to which his life has been so far directed, and from a sense of duty devote himself entirely to the attainment of "the one thing necessary." Linacre appears only to have done what many another in the history of {82} the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries did without any comment; but his English biographers insist on seeing ulterior motives in it, or else fail entirely to understand it. The same action is not so rare even in our own day that it should be the source of misconception by later writers. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell has, in the early part of _Dr. North and His Friends_, a very curious passage with regard to Linacre. One of the characters, St. Clair, says: "I saw, the other day, at Owen's, a life of one Linacre, a doctor, who had the luck to live about 1460 to 1524, when men knew little and thought they knew all. In his old age he took for novelty to reading St. Matthew. The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters were enough. He threw the book aside and cried out, 'Either this is not the Gospel, or we are not Christians.' What else could he say?" St. Clair uses the story to enforce an idea of his own, which he states as a question, as follows: "And have none of you the courage to wrestle with the thought I gave you, that Christ could not have expected the mass of men to live the life He pointed out as desirable for the first disciples of His faith?"