The Roman Law considered the services of an advocate and of a physician as strictly honorific; and, as in the Roman age, practitioners in law and medicine, were usually men of leisure and wealthy, who did not practise for the sake of a livelihood, remuneration for their services could not be recovered in the ordinary way. Although owing to the Utopian ideas concerning the honour of a liberal profession then in vogue it was considered that any mention of a “fee,” or a “salary,” by that name would soil and disgrace the robe of a practitioner, still it was an established fiction of the Civil Law that the promise of an _honorarium_ always accompanied the employment of a professional man, and that such promise created one of those obligations that might be enforced by action [10]. The Common Law of England adopted the theory of the Civil Law as to the high standing of the profession, but afforded no remedy for the recovery of the charges. Surgeons and apothecaries were enabled to recover by law remuneration for their services, but a physician was presumed to attend his patient for an _honorarium_ (something left to the honour of the patient to pay or not to pay), and could not maintain an action for his fees until the passing of the Medical Act, 1858, put an end to his anomalous position in this money-making age, and gave him as free an entrance into the courts of law to recover compensation for his work and labour, time and |16| skill bestowed, as the worker in any other path of life. Before this a physician could not recover even expenses out of pocket, such as those incurred in travelling to visit a patient, unless there had been an agreement specially made to that effect [11]. If a physician was a surgeon as well, and attended a case where the advice of a physician and the aid of a surgeon were necessary, he could recover the value of his services as a surgeon but not as a physician [12]. In England the question sometimes arises, where the practitioner is only a surgeon, whether he can charge for attendance as a physician or as an apothecary. It has been held that typhus fever is not a disease that belongs to a surgeon’s branch of medicine, and that he cannot therefore recover for his attendance on a patient suffering under it. So, too, with regard to consumption and dropsy, though, in the latter case, he may recover for any work done for the patient specifically within his practise, such as puncturation, scarification, bandaging and friction [13].