More ‘Marginal Men’: A Prosopography of Scottish Shop-keeping Doctors in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

This article traces the class background, educational pathways and career profiles of over 100 Scottish medical practitioners who owned dispensary, and more general, retail, stores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It demonstrates that such doctors were often experienced practitioners who held a range of additional medical appointments. It also outlines the inter-connections between the professions of medicine and pharmacy with many sample doctors having experience as chemists and druggists before entering medicine. Following the work of Inkster on ‘marginal men’, it suggests that the medical community at the turn of the twentieth century was more heterogeneous than has hitherto been acknowledged by historians of the medical profession. The article concludes that keeping a dispensary shop was common into the twentieth century and was not a throwback to an era when professionalisation was at an early stage.