• Granting of special privileges led to a complicated interlacing of permitted and forbidden practices
• Lindemann, quoting an early 19th-century assessment of medical practice:
  • A bewildering array of "ordinary guild surgeons, privileged bathmasters, veterinary empirics, among them executioners and shepherds, manufacturers of medicines and their agents, dealers in patent remedies, 'emergency' apothecaries, sellers of cosmetics and arcana, sedentary and peripatetic operateurs, including oculists, lithotomists, dentists, and corn doctors; laymen, who inoculate the cowpox, or promise to restore hunch-backs, twisted limbs and clubfeet to straightness; 'experimentalists' who apply electricity, galvanic fluids, and magnetism ... and those who claim to possess the touch or to heal by sympathy" populated the countryside. And almost all of these purported to have, and many could actually prove, a legal right to practice.

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