The transformation of medical education in eighteenth-century England: international developments and the West Midlands

This article deals with transformations in eighteenth-century medical education. Its focus is the work of an individual surgeon, Thomas Tomlinson, who delivered one of the earliest anatomical courses in provincial England. It examines methods of medical education between 1760 and 1825, when apprenticeship was being transformed into a more learned form of instruction and medical education was more regularly offered and undertaken in lecture, operation and dissection theatres, if not yet rooted in medical schools and teaching hospitals. By further considering developments in clinical training in Leiden, the emergence of clinical teaching methods in Edinburgh and London and the introduction of anatomical courses in both the English metropolis and provinces in the eighteenth century, it aims to establish the place of this relatively unknown provincial pedagogue in the wider world of eighteenth-century European medicine.