Today we conventionally consult encyclopaedias for biographical information. Probably at least as many readers seek this in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as in the Dictionary of National Biography, or Who's Who, or other specialist biographical dictionaries. But in the famous encyclopaedias of the Enlightenment such biographical information was absent. Neither Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia of 1728 nor the more renowned Encyclopedie (1751–80) edited by Denis Diderot and Jean D'Alembert, contained any biographical entries: when personal names appear these usually represent some larger intellectual doctrine, such as Baconianism, Cartesianism, or Newtonianism. From the early nineteenth century encyclopaedias began to include the biographical entries we now expect. However in its 1985 revision, the Britannica decided to relegate all biographical articles from its Macropaedia to the Micropaedia, except for those on ‘100 people who profoundly affected world history’. This was a departure from its previous twentieth-century editions, but still a long way from the rigorous exclusion practised by its eighteenth-century predecessors.

Biography today occupies an unusual, perhaps even an uncomfortable, place in our culture, being one of the most popular and yet least studied forms of contemporary writing. Readers in their tens of thousands consume biographies avidly and offer publishers a sure market for the life stories of writers, musicians, film stars and sporting heroes. ‘The Age of Biography is Upon Us’ announces a recent article (Bowker 1993), as anyone will know who steps into a bookshop or glances at the year's best-seller lists. A 1994 poll on reading habits in Britain showed biography to be the most popular category of non-fiction book, selected as their favourite by 19 per cent of readers, a number matched by the most popular category of fiction, ‘romance’, and considerably ahead of contemporary fiction, read by just 14 per cent of readers (D.S. 1994; see also Beauchamp 1990 for US data). The market for biography is by no means restricted to the ‘popular’ end of the spectrum: a typical issue of the Times Literary Supplement (21 October 1994) carried a lead review devoted to a biography of William Tyndale, an extended review of a biography of Mrs Dorothy Jordan, and reviews of biographies of Kremlin wives, and Nikolai Bukharin's widow: in its listings, there were more entries under ‘Biography’ than under ‘Fiction’, ‘Polities’, ‘Literature and Criticism’, more than in any other category.

Like many readers of this chapter my early encounters with science were not only through the school laboratory and classroom but also through reading biographies of scientists. Excepting the adventures of Biggies and Gimlet, my serious reading as a child was largely confined to biographies of Newton, Davy, Pasteur and many others, often in the form of collected biographies, such as Egon Larsen's Men who Changed the World (1954) and J.G. Crowther's Six Great Scientists (1955). Such works kindled my interest in science and played some role (which I leave to my future biographers to specify) in my choice of career, first as a physicist and subsequently as an historian of science. Yet as a young consumer of biographies I would have had no appreciation of the complexities of biographical narratives or of their cultural, educational and ideological functions. I simply lapped them up and contented myself by reading about the Great and the Good and how they contributed to science.

More recently I have re-engaged the subject of scientific biography not only as a consumer but also as a producer, in writing a biographical study of Michael Faraday, in which I paid particular attention to the interrelation between his science and his religion.

In 1796, William Blizard, surgeon to the London Hospital and earnest Anglican, introduced one of his pamphlets with a revealing text. He chose a passage by William Blackstone, the eminent legal commentator, Member of Parliament, and judge.

Blizard went on to discuss the topic at hand – the importance of assistant surgeons in hospitals – as an application of this teleological principle. His essay resonated with the analogies he evoked with Blackstone's statement: hospitals were like “all Bodies politic,” like “Natural Bodies,” like God's creation. Inspired founders had shared God's vital spark, infusing their work with an all-encompassing Design. Blizard implicitly played out the rest of the analogy. Just as humans had to figure out God's Design to understand nature, hospital governors needed to grasp the founders' Design to carry out their “General Duties.” Unfortunately, like corrupted churchmen, governors tended to forget “all the great objects they comprehend” and to fail to “appreciate their own true, high relation to the public.” Blizard hastened to remind them that they were responsible “for their conduct to science, to humanity, to all mankind.”

This was rather heavy-handed rhetoric for introducing an argument that the surgeons of the London Hospital needed help with their charitable duties, but Blizard was not one to resist a high moral tone when he held a pen.

In the preface to their first volume of Medical Observations and Inquiries (1757), a “Society of Physicians in London” praised the publications of the Royal Society and the Parisian Academy of Sciences, yet noted that their scope “does not allow them to insert several things … calculated only for the improvement of physick.” Furthermore, the anonymous editor(s) continued, some

“Mixed company,” a phrase that evokes audiences of men and women, suggests that these physicians had extraordinary delicacy about presenting medical details to nonmedical men, unless prim ladies indeed visited the Royal Society meetings. Note how the physicians claimed to be the only “adequate judges” of their experiences. They could share the “entertaining” or “instructive” case with educated folk, but they were the appropriate interpreters of such matters of fact. Asserting their unique expertise had, of course, always marked medical practitioners, however much they negotiated their authority with patients and peers. So the editor(s) went on to explain the particular grounds for their valuable work:

On 1 May 1740, the Fellows of the Royal Society elected James Hawley, MD, to join them as an FRS. His nomination letter, exhibited at the society from 31 January to 24 April for his potential colleagues to examine, described Dr. Hawley as a

Signed by four relatively undistinguished members, Hawley's certificate followed a pattern already familiar to the Fellows: this man would fit in. In contrast, those had who nominated John Andrée the previous October had stated that he was a

Andrée's supporters included Sir Hans Sloane, President of the Society, and Cromwell Mortimer, MD, its Secretary. Yet it was unusual to detail publications in nomination letters: perhaps this man did not fit in.

“Sir,” wrote John Wood of Sittingbourne, Kent, on 28 May 1788, to George Neale, surgeon,

Nineteen years after walking the London's wards, John Wood found that evidence of that experience might “be necessary” for his practice in Kent. His brief request suggests the little ways that hospital training crept into the making of regular medical men in the eighteenth century. In 1769, Wood chose to pay to watch and assist elite surgeons in their charitable work, spending twelve months engaged in an activity hardly required for a surgeon, or surgeon-apothecary, to start treating patients in Britain. Yet it mattered. In 1788 the “Certificate from the Hospital” was valuable. It marked Wood as a practitioner with an appropriate background, whatever he actually learned under Neale and the other surgeons.

For the emergence of hospital teaching in London, Wood's decision to enter the wards evokes part of the story, the demand side, as it were, of institutional change.

“Charitable knowledge,” I have been told, is a rather peculiar conjunction of words. People are benevolent, generous, lenient, merciful, or philanthropic, giving of their time, compassion, or money; knowledge – well, knowledge, qua knowledge, is not. Yet “charitable knowledge” captures the major arguments in this book. Practitioners in eighteenth-century London hospitals used their medical knowledge and skills for charitable ends. They spent hours voluntarily attending to the sick poor. They tried to help ill men and women to get better, whether or not they were particularly successful with their cures or especially kind to the poor folk under their care. During the eighteenth century, hospital physicians and surgeons made teaching pupils on the wards integral to hospitals' charitable duties. In order to do that, they had to make the daily presence of large numbers of pupils on the wards fit into the meaning of charity for the lay governors whose time and money supported the hospitals. Using hospital patients as teaching objects had to become a good thing to do, a valuable contribution to social betterment for all people, not just a useful experience for a very small number of apprentices and personal assistants.

The modern teaching hospital exists because we – as a culture if not as individuals – in a fundamental sense value the moments when an experienced clinician instructs a medical student using the body and responses of a hospital patient.

“[L]ast night a nasty little dog was in the dissecting room shut up there for some experiment or other & made free with the Os Cuboides & the falanges of the little Toe, for wh. I have substituted part of an other foot,” wrote Hampton Weekes, a resident apothecary's pupil at St. Thomas's, to his father on 10 November 1801. Busy making anatomical preparations to send home, Hampton evinced complete disinterest in what that “experiment or other” might have been about, much less concern for the fate of the dog. Hampton later warned his family: “These things I suppose you will not circulate for what I tell you on this head I conceive goes no farther.” Hampton, happily participating in the clinical and anatomical rituals at St. Thomas's and Guy's, was quite blasé about the notion of animal experiments, yet clearly aware others might not have such enlightened views. Hampton, in short, even as a pupil on the fringes of hospital men's investigations, identified with the culture of “men of science.” He acquired those tidbits of theory that extended his repertoire not only into talk of constitutions and ultimate causes for disease, but also into experiments and science. He savored those delicious moments of knowing more about nature than others did: “I tell Dick ye source of animal heat is acertained ask him if he knows it,” he wrote to his sister, Mary Ann, “This is a chemical operation–.”

The history of medical education in London seen through official records, from the minute books of the Surgeons' Company to Acts of Parliament, is a patchwork of regulations and traditions that hides as much as it reveals about medical organization and practice. From the bureaucratic perspective that such documents offer, London medical men were separated into the familiar tripartite division of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, each with its own corporate body, public voice, and standards of appropriate medical training. Entry into the Royal College of Physicians, the Surgeons' Company, or the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries certainly marked professional status and acceptance into the mainstream of metropolitan practice. Yet, as much recent work has shown, defining the medical profession(s) according to these corporations' claims flies in the face of contemporary understanding of who could and should practice medicine. The lines between “quacks” and “regulars,” so bitterly drawn by medical men threatened for their livelihoods and so frequently ignored by their potential patients, are more realistically cast as the shades of gray between regular and irregular practitioners. Community acceptance and length of experience could matter as much as – or more than – formal licensing, university degrees, or corporate membership in establishing a full-time medical career in much of eighteenth-century Britain.