In those closing years of the fifteenth century which ushered in the new Tudor monarchy the art of healing derived from two sources, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the organizations of barbers and surgeons. At Oxford medical teaching was organized by the fifteenth century, and medicine constituted one of the four faculties of the university together with theology, law, and arts. Yet at Oxford, as at Cambridge, the medical curriculum was long to remain medieval.[1] Both schools had taken their model from Paris, but whereas Parisian medicine had begun to stir and advance in the fifteenth century, the English universities remained somnolent. At Cambridge the degree of Doctor of Medicine required altogether twelve years of study based upon lectures and discussions drawn from medieval sources. While it is true that two years of this time were to be spent in the practice of medicine—seemingly a borrowing from the methods of Montpellier—there was no provision for human anatomical study,[2] although this was recognized and demonstrated with some slight annual regularity to the Parisian students from the latter fifteenth century onward. If we turn to the other source of healing, the organizations of the barbers and the surgeons, in so far as anatomy was concerned the situation was no better and, indeed, it may be said to have been worse in view of the obvious relationship which ought to have obtained between surgery and anatomy. In London the fraternity of barbers existed as early as 1308,[3] and the craft of surgery as a body distinct from that of the barbers is recorded in 1368.[4] Both barbers and surgeons sought to establish rules of professional conduct for the members of their respective organizations as well as a period of time and a curriculum to be satisfied by aspirants to barbery or to surgery. Despite the efforts of the surgeons to control the practice of surgery, relegating to the barbers only the most simple and menial tasks, certain of the more ambitious barbers sought to go beyond such activities as beard-trimming, cutting, and phlebotomy, and this determination gave rise in the first quarter of the fifteenth century to the barber-surgeon[, no longer acting in the normal occupation of the barber and clearly divorced from his old trade.[5]