Royal College of Physicians

Thomas Linacre, an English physician and classical scholar who had studied medicine in Italy and translated Galen's works into Latin, petitioned King Henry VIII to establish a formal college of physicians for London, modeled on similar continental bodies, in order to distinguish trained and examined practitioners from the many unlicensed healers then practicing in the city. Henry VIII granted the petition and founded the College of Physicians by royal charter on 23 September 1518, with Linacre as its first president, giving the new body the authority to examine and license physicians and to punish unlicensed or malpracticing ones within the City of London and seven miles around it.

An Act of Parliament in 1523 extended the College's licensing authority from London across all of England, formalizing its role as the kingdom's principal regulator of legitimate medical practice, a jurisdiction that would repeatedly place the College at the center of disputes over what counted as legitimate medicine as new movements arose over the following centuries. The College received the additional word Royal in recognition of its status over time and moved among several London premises before settling into its present home, continuing to hold examinations and confer fellowship on physicians it judged qualified.

The College's licensing authority made it a natural point of resistance whenever new medical movements challenged the therapeutic consensus of the day. In the early nineteenth century mesmerism, imported from the continent, found some sympathetic hearing among individual English physicians, but the wider medical establishment the College represented generally treated public demonstrations of mesmeric surgery and mesmeric healing with suspicion, a skepticism that hardened as the practice became associated with popular entertainment rather than the more experimental atmosphere of the earlier French commissions. Homeopathy posed a sharper and better documented institutional challenge: in an 1852 letter, the College's president described homeopaths as neither skilful nor safe practitioners, whom the College could not license without betraying its trust to the public, a stance that captures the profession's institutional posture toward homeopathy for much of the Victorian era even as a growing number of trained physicians practiced it themselves.

The Medical Act of 1858, which created a unified register of recognized practitioners, left homeopaths a contested and marginal status within organized medicine that colleges including the RCP did little to ease. These disputes reflect the College's structural role throughout the period this Atlas covers: not a body that investigated psychical or alternative therapeutic claims directly, in the manner of the Society for Psychical Research or the French Academy of Sciences, but the licensing gatekeeper whose approval or refusal determined whether a given practice could operate within recognized medicine at all.