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« on: Tuesday 09 October 12 03:21 BST (UK) »
A chap I know who lives in Australia is writing a book about his late father-in-law Major Sam Newland (who was a war hero and also a close friend of my grandfather's) and about his father-in-law's father, Surgeon-Major Arthur Newland, who was a pioneering photographer and lexicographer and the resident medic for a tribal people called the Chin in north Burma. Unfortunately most of Arthur's records have not survived.
Arthur had an unspecified medical qualification of some sort from the University of Madras, an LRCP & S from the Royal Colleges in Edinburgh which he gained in November 1880, and probably some sort of midwifery qualification, also gained in Edinburgh. His studies in Madras must have been of a level that equipped him to practice medicine, or nearly so, for he was only in Edinburgh for a matter of months prior to taking the LRCP & S and seems not to have actually studied at the Royal Colleges: he arrived in Edinburgh already trained and then was examined on what he already knew. He was known either as Major Newland or just as Arthur Newland, and seems never to have used the title Dr Newland.
Some time ago, a couple of years I think, this chap in Australia communicated with somebody in Edinburgh about the meaning of Arthur's qualifications but either the information or his memory of it is suspect, because a) he had confused the degrees of MB and MD and b) he had confused the Medical School of the Royal Colleges with the one at the university and c) he swears one of his contacts told him Arthur did a full academic year at Edinburgh University, which is untrue both on the count that the university has no record of him, and that he wasn't in Edinburgh anything like a full year. So the information he recalls getting from his contacts has to be treated with caution.
He swears that this person he spoke to told him that the LRCP & S was definitely a lesser degree than an MBBCh, and that Licentiates were not entitled to use the honorific "Doctor".
On the other hand, the Chief Librarian at Surgeon's Hall says that the LRCP & S was much the same standard as an MBBCh and that Arthur was most definitely entitled to call himself doctor, since he was in the Medical Register.
Everything I have managed to find out myself supports the idea that the LRCP & S is/was of the same medical standard as the MBBCh, although there are suggestions that it was a qualification which originally tended to be given to people of lower social class than those who went to university, and Debrett's says that holder of the MBBCh usually take precedence over those with the LRCP & S. This I take to be because the Royal Colleges don't have the whole leafy quadrangles and boating-clubs social scene that you get at the older universities, rather than because there is any difference in medical standard.
I have come across some people on the net who have LRCP & S to their name and don't seem to call themselves doctor, but I don't know whether that means they aren't *allowed* to call themselves doctor or whether it's one of these social oddities like surgeons in some specialties calling themselves mister.
So, in summation, I need to know,
a) Whether an LRCP & S is as good a qualification, medically speaking, as an MBBCh, and was this the case in the Victorian era?
b) Is it indeed the case that people who have an LRCP & S but not an MBBCh do not call themselves doctor, or tend not to do so, and if this is indeed the case, is it because they aren't allowed to do so, or because they for some reason choose not to do so?