There have, of course, always been ‘doctors’ or healers. In the past, they were very different from those who minister to our health today. Priests, mystics and local ‘wise women’ historically held control over our health, even following the time of Hippocrates, whose famous Oath still finds a place in modern medical ethics. After a long period in which quacks and mavericks flourished, the 19th century saw the beginning of the formal regulation of what had become a recognised and distinctive profession of physicians and surgeons which, in turn, laid the foundations of the Health Service that we know today. Inevitably, the law played an increasingly significant role in this regulation and, in parallel with this, a new culture of medical ethics has grown up to supplement the legal requirements.

While both the organisation and the capacities of the profession evolved fairly steadily until, say, the Second World War, since then there has been an exponential increase in medicine's ability to alleviate symptoms and to cure underlying disease. At the same time, medicine has changed from what was essentially an art into a discipline increasingly grounded in science. We have become so used to progress in treatment that it is sometimes forgotton how recently many of modern medicine's ‘miracles’ were developed.