Page:Lives of British Physicians.djvu/24

8 BRITISH PHYSICIANS. which his station afforded him, to promote the in- terests of science and the welfare of the public. He founded two lectures on physic in the Univer- sity of Oxford, and one in that of Cambridge. The endowment at Oxford was left to Merton College ; and the Cambridge lecture was given to St. John's College. But the great glory of Linacre was, that he projected and accomplished a most important ser- vice to medicine, by the institution of the Royal College of Physicians in London. He had beheld with concern the jiractice of physic chiefly en- grossed by illiterate monks and empirics ; a na- tural consequence of committing the power of ap- proving and licensing practitioners to the bisliops in their several dioceses, who certainly must have been very incompetent judges of medical ability. To strike at the root of this evil, he therefore ob- tained, by his interest with Cardinal Wolsey, let- ters patent from Henry VIII., dated in the yeac 1518, constituting a corporate body of regular- bred physicians, in London, in whom should re- side the sole privilege of admitting persons to practise within that city, and a circuit of seven miles round it. To use the words of the charter of the college : Before this period, a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part had no insight into physic, nor in any other kind of learning 3 some could not even read the letters on the book, so far forth, that common artificers, as smiths, weavers, and women, boldly and accustomably took upon them great cures, to the high displea- sure of God, great infamy of the faculty, and the