The physicians and surgeons were originally very different orders of men. Medicine is in most Christian countries an offshoot of the clerical profession. So profitable was the practice of medicine, that not only monks, but many of the higher clergy, devoted themselves to it. The union of the two professions of medicine and divinity existed up to the middle of the seventeenth century, and evidence of it is still found in the “Lambeth M.D.,” a degree which the Archbishop of Canterbury still has the right to confer, but only upon a legally qualified practitioner. It was thought necessary by Pope Innocent III. (1198-1216) to forbid the clergy to undertake any operation involving the shedding of blood, and by decrees of other popes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were forbidden to practise surgery in any form. In this way medicine and surgery became divorced, and this forcible and arbitrary separation of two branches of the same subject served undoubtedly to hinder the progress of medical knowledge to an enormous extent. Medicine was thus left mainly in the hands of scholars, of men who at that time stood alone in the possession of scholastic learning, while surgery was handed over to men who had little or no scholarship, but who amassed a considerable amount of practical wisdom in the daily struggle with the difficulties of their craft. The early physicians, like Chaucer’s “Doctour of Phisik,” often had an extensive knowledge of the writings of the Greek, Latin, and Arabian writers, who may be considered as the medical “fathers.” These were their scriptures, which to doubt was heresy. They knew nothing beyond them, and it is not surprising that priestly medicine, divorced as it was from those practical matters in overcoming which we alone get wisdom, was absolutely unprogressive and unproductive. If the early clerical physicians did little for medicine as a science, they did a great deal for it as a profession. They were men of learning and high culture; they had had a university training; and we shall see that many of them were well born and had been brought up amongst high-minded gentlemen; and undoubtedly it is due to the College of Physicians, and largely to some of its earlier members, that the profession of medicine has been practised in this country in a manner which is mainly creditable. Glaring exceptions, of course, have occurred; but, as a rule, the men who have neglected to conduct themselves as gentlemen have met with no encouragement from the College of Physicians, and I believe it would be difficult to over-estimate the influence for good which the College has had in this direction.