A Vital Operation: GMC Established
Richard Willis charts how order was brought to the medical profession by the foundation of the General Medical Council 150 years ago.
Between 1840 and 1858, a national movement comprising the leading doctors and medics of the age advocated a set of policies designed to protect patients against unlicensed medical practitioners.
The legislation providing for the GMC and its register had been passed a few months earlier in 1858 and came into force that October. The 1858 Medical Act stated that the council’s foremost objective was to enable ‘persons to distinguish qualified from unqualified practitioners’. The following month, Sir James Clark, Sir Charles Hastings, William Lawrence and Thomas Pridgin Teale were appointed the GMC’s first leaders. The first meeting took place within three months of the statute, and from January 1859 no doctor was able to recover fees in a court of law unless he could prove that he had registered under the Act.
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