Dentistry and the University of London

Abstract

The lack of professional qualifications was felt keenly by some nineteenth-century medical and dental practitioners. In 1860, the Lancet highlighted a scheme “to avoid the operation of the Medical Act, and to enable uneducated and unprincipled men to defraud the public”. It quoted an advertisement from a daily newspaper. Mr T Vary had announced that “Doctors, Druggists, Chemists, or Dentists, who have no Medical Diploma, can hear of an easy method of obtaining one” by writing to him at Jones's Coffee House in London's Tottenham Court Road. In response to an enquiry, Vary told the Lancet that he had just come from America where a friend “had graduated … in 1857, with all the honours”. However, the latter “had to leave America without his diploma” because of a lack of money for his graduation fees, and so had asked him to pay off the debt and bring back the diploma to Europe. Vary said: “I have done so; but have been detained longer than was anticipated, and now find my friend dead”. Indicating that he did not want to lose the money which he had paid on behalf of his friend, Vary continued: “Fortunately, as is common in America, the space for the name is left blank, to allow the graduate to have it filled up to suit his fancy by some writing master”. He proposed to sell the diploma and supporting papers for £23, which, he pointed out, was “as good as if five years' labour and 1500 dollars had been given to obtain it”. Later in the same year, the Lancet stressed that the practice of buying a Continental degree of MD, without examination or residence, was clearly a “fraud upon the public … repugnant to professional honour and destructive of professional character”. It published details of a proposition sent to Mr Pound, a surgeon in Odiham, to obtain a degree “by simple purchase”. Enclosed was a printed circular: “If you wish to become a M.D. without absenting yourself from your professional duties, I can procure you the degree from a Continental University of the highest reputation, on terms more moderate than any hitherto known in this country”. The circular was accompanied by a letter addressed personally to Pound by a Dr H A Caesar, MD, FRCSI. There is no way of knowing how many doctors or dentists actually bought copies of that or similar false diplomas.