Cambridge and its contribution to medicine : proceedings of the Seventh British Congress on the History of Medicine, University of Cambridge, 10-13 September, 1969 / edited by Arthur Rook.

  • British Congress on the History of Medicine 1969 : University of Cambridge)
Date:
1971
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Cambridge and its contribution to medicine : proceedings of the Seventh British Congress on the History of Medicine, University of Cambridge, 10-13 September, 1969 / edited by Arthur Rook. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    college, for a master and fourteen fellows studiously engaged in the pursuit of literature, but this did not exclude medicine for which one of the fellowships was available. There were further attempts in the fourteenth century to accommodate poor scholars as well as the sick in St. John's Hospital and it may be that some of these were studying medicine for it is in this century that the first Cambridge medical graduates appear. Simon de Holbeche was a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1307, who came to Peterhouse and held a fellowship until his death in 1335; he was a Cambridge M.A. and possibly M.D. and left medical manuscripts to both colleges. Of John Martyn of Peterhouse, we know that Bishop Montacute gave him leave to study medicine in 1339, while John de Stockton, a member of the bishop's familia, and a fellow of the college gave the library a copy of Gilbertus Anglicus in 1341 and the inscription reveals him as a doctor of medicine ; he later became rector of Brington in Huntingdonshire, dying there in 1361. One cannot be sure that these physician fellows of Peterhouse received their medical degrees at Cambridge but Richard de Oudeby certainly did; he became a fellow in 1350, received his M.B. in 1363 and M.D. later. He was ordained priest in 1371 and was rector of Todenham in Gloucestershire and later removed to London com bining medicine with his clerical duties; on his death in 1391 he left a large number of medical manuscripts to his college. Almost contemporary was William de Rougham, a foundation fellow of Gonville Hall, whose statutes permitted two of the twenty fellows to study medicine; he became Master in 1360, received his M.B. in 1363 and M.D. in 1390, enjoyed a number of benefices in Suffolk, and at his own expense completed the chapel and the buildings on the north side of the Court. Accordingly, though the evidence is fragmentary—provision of college medical fellowships, donations of medical manuscripts to college libraries, scattered names of physician clerics with their benefices—it is apparent that a medical school was evolving in Cambridge by the latter part of the fourteenth century though it was not until 1396 that the earliest medical statutes and set books are known, which are modelled on those of Oxford of a century earlier, which were based on the regulations of the University of Paris. At Cambridge the three senior faculties, Theology, Law and