Institutional Medicine and State Intervention in Eighteenth–Century Ireland

This article suggests that the Irish parliament, though it met regularly from 1692 to its abolition in 1800, was reluctant to intervene in the regulation of interest that were overseen by corporations or charters bodies, particularly, in the case of the charter granted to the College of Physicians in 1692, when it provided that body with extensive powers. Parliament rejected repeated attempts by the College, during the early part of the century, to put these powers on a statutory foundation when it realised that they might serve, as apothecaries and surgeons repeatedly argued, to ‘ring fence’ physicians’ right to proscribe and diagnose, whereby increasing the financial burden on the poor.