Doctors and Disappointment: Career Turbulence in an Age of Professionalization,
c. 1780s-1880s
Chair: Professor Steven King (Leicester University)
'The existing mockery of so-called poor law inquiries': the context of charges of
neglect against Dr Joseph Rogers – Dr Kim Price (Leicester University)
Joseph Rogers is a relatively well-known figure in English welfare reform in the nineteenth
century, but in the few articles that discuss Rogers or draw on his autobiography, there is
very limited engagement with the two charges of neglect against him (comprising two
suspensions and one dismissal) and the turbulent final decades of his career. Rogers tends to
be discussed in the context of the successful reform movement that preceded and forced
Gathorne Hardy's Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867. At most, there are a couple of sentences
that mention the charges against him but avoid the crucial context of the official inquiries
into his 'neglect'. There is also no discussion by historians of the failures that followed the
Metropolitan Act and the general wall of indifference that Rogers came up against after
1867. The paper will discuss this period. The context of increased charges of medical
negligence against poor law doctors in the 1870s and 1880s has much to do with both the
charges against Joseph Rogers, his dismissal in 1867, and the failure of Rogers' reform
movement from 1870. There are some major contextual strands to this discussion: the Local
Government Board inspectorate; the crusade against out relief; the poor-law claims
procedure; poor-law medical standards, neglect and ethical considerations; and the legal
strictures of hiring and firing medical officers. This paper places Rogers, and the charges of
neglect against him, within the context of the time, and considers what charges of neglect in
this period under the poor law tended to imply.
The Stresses of Professional Life: suicide among medical practitioners c.1820-c.1890 – Dr
Alannah Tomkins (Keele University)
The risks of medical practice for the health of the practitioner were known to be high in the
nineteenth century. A combination of professional stress and access to the means of rapid
self-destruction meant that surgeons, apothecaries and physicians were particularly prone
to suicide as a cause of early death. Yet this generality has not been explored in detail. The
availability in the 21st century of digital resources, such as the British Library’s Nineteenth
Century Newspapers, permits unprecedented access to evidence of medical suicide via the
(scattered) reports of coroners’ courts. Therefore this paper will consider the 280+
instances of medical suicide reported in the English provincial press up to 1890 from three
perspectives. What was the reaction of the lay press to doctors’ suicide and how did this
change over time? How did the medical press respond to the loss of colleagues by this
means? And do patterns emerge when successful acts of destruction are mapped onto the
respective practitioners’ personal and professional life-cycles?
Correcting the Market: Gurney Turner and the colonial medical marketplace - Professor
Margot Finn (Warwick University)
This paper uses the life of Gurney Turner (1813-48) to explore nineteenth-century British
doctors’ understanding of the medical marketplace in which a successful professional career
could be constructed in an era marked by a perceived surplus of practitioners. Turner was
the eldest surviving son of the noted botanist and antiquary Dawson Turner (1775-1858) and
was a brother-in-law of Sir William Hooker (1785-1865), botanist and Director of Kew.
Family expectations for Gurney Turner’s medical career were accordingly high, and he
worked frenetically for several years in London to establish a publication profile in medical
research, to gain prestigious hospital appointments and to establish a private practice.
When these activities failed to bring him professional success, Turner used his family’s
patronage to secure an appointment as a surgeon in the East India Company service. His
struggles to negotiate the metropolitan and colonial medical marketplaces are chronicled in
great detail in his letters to family member from the 1830s-1840s, which provide much
insight into both the strategic uses that nineteenth-century doctors made of the imperial
marketplace for medicine and the increasing role of scientific publication in creating
successful medical careers in Britain and its colonies.