Talk:Surgeon
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Previous old discussion from the Talk:Surgery page from when Surgeon redirected to Surgery has been archived to: Talk:Surgery or Surgeon/ Archive.
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[edit] Surgeons' salaries
The neurosurgery salary is listed at 1,337,000 which is obviously an (un)cleverly disguised 1337 or leet(elite) reference. If someone knows the actual values... make it so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.235.54.59 (talk) 19:18, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
[edit] Surgeons' titles
Re British surgeons' use of "Mr," I wonder whether this could be related to their former privilege of being addressed as "Master" (in the original charter of the London College) or "Maister" (in Edinburgh and Glasgow). I don't know if this was a special privilege of their profession, or one they had in common with senior members of other craft guilds at the time. NRPanikker (talk) 17:50, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
On the contrary,surgeons are adressed as Mister because surgery was originally performed by barbers with no medical qualifications.Physicians called themselves Doctor to distinguish themselves from barber-surgeons whose profession they considered inferior,in an example of reverse snobbery surgeons now consider Mr. the superior title.The red and white barbers pole represents a bandage on a bloody surgical wound,recalling their former profession.94.197.170.169 (talk) 23:27, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
[edit] Low Status and Ignorance?
Wikipedia articles on "surgeon" and "surgery" tend to emphasise the practitioners past low status and lack of formal education and qualifications. This is grossly exaggerated.
The Hippocratic oath originally prohibited lithotomy, which had its own specialised practitioners, not surgery in general. Although dissection of the human body was rarely allowed in ancient Greece and Rome, surgeons were not always of low status. Think of Galen, who started his career as surgeon to the gladiators and achieved canonical status alongside Aristotle in the universities of mediaeval Europe.
Although surgeons and barbers were before modern times members of the same professional bodies, there was usually a distinction between the majority who did hair cutting, shaving and blood-letting and the much smaller group who performed surgical operations: the long gown (robe longue) versus short gown (robe court) members in the case of the College of Saints Cosmas and Damien, the forerunner of the Royal Academy of Surgery in Paris. The babers-surgeons' guilds in the British Isles had similar divisions.
This may parallel the separation, as late as 1617, of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, who sold medicines, from the older Company of Grocers, who sold spices in London.
A I have said above, qualified surgeons were allowed by royal charters in England and Scotland to use versions of the title of "master." In Paris, although surgeons were excluded from the Faculty of Medicine and so could not become Doctors of Medicine, they had their own School of Surgery which awarded titles of bachelor and master. They were originally subject to the supervision of physicians, but eventually managed to escape that. When the Universities reopened after the French revolution, the medical course could terminate with the degree of Doctor of Medicine or Doctor of Sugery. This was not a new invention: Maister Peter Lowe, the founder of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons in Glasgow and author of the first English language surgical textbook, describes himself on its title page as a Doctor of Surgery from Paris.
Before the surgical colleges were there to examine and qualify apprentices, the bishops and archbishops of England were able to examine and licence both men and women to practice various professions, including medicine, surgery and midwifery. (See the Lambeth Palace Library's website).
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge also issued such licences (licentiae ad practicandum, as opposed to licentiae docendi) and these were at one time more commonly obtained than the degrees of bachelor and doctor of medicine. This accounted for only a small proportion of those in surgical practice. There were at one extreme those who skipped the BA to go directly in five years to the Licence in Medicine and then join the Royal College of Physicians in London (and adopt the title of doctor) to work as physicians, and at the other a few who studied for a dozen years and obtained an MD degree before the surgical licence.
Despite the struggles between top-ranking physicians and surgeons, most medical practice was carried out by less elevated men who covered both medicine and surgery. In England they used to be called apothecaries, surgeons or surgeon-apothecaries before the term general practitioner came into use. In Scotland, although the universities gave Doctor of Medicine degrees, their graduates were competent in both fields, as were the Licentiates of the surgical corporations in Scotland and Ireland. Pure surgery and pure medicine were possible only in the big cities. NRPanikker (talk) 15:26, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Salaries
I know for a fact the salary scale is way off. Most neurosurgeons in the US rarely make 1mil a year, let alone 8. Wikifan12345 (talk) 09:11, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
