The marketplace of print

The cluster of ideas we now call ‘the medical marketplace’ comes from the intersection of three different historiographic strands in the mid-1980s and the 1990s. First, the medical marketplace became a kind of shorthand for a critique of older ideas about the structures and regulation of the medical profession. The old narrative was of a tripartite London-centred hierarchy of rank and value: physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, each assigned specific healing functions that minimized competition between them. The work of Harold Cook and Margaret Pelling demolished this older view.¹ Taken together, these two painted a picture of a College of Physicians that was neither particularly powerful nor controlled medical practice. In the 1970s, medical sociologists such as Nicholas Jewson and Ivan Waddington had reminded us that doctors competed with each other for patients, often in crowded markets, and Pelling in particular emphasized the variable nature of medical work and underlined its economic aspects.².