Radical Puritans in the English Revolution (1642–60) wanted to transform the nation's institutions ‘root and branch’. Not least amongst the evils they abhorred and aimed to eradicate was the existing medical profession. Reformers such as William Dell maintained that healing had been perverted by the corrupt, privileged clique who controlled London's Royal College of Physicians (chartered in 1518), and thereby regulated other practitioners. This learned elite, academically trained in Greek medicine through a protracted university education, dogmatically upheld (so reformers alleged) the exploded medical system associated with the authority of the Graeco-Roman physician Galen and other ‘ancients’. By using the powers granted to it by royal charter to restrict membership and thereby to police London medical practice, the College oligarchy, bent on power and profit, was, the radicals claimed, blocking the spread of newer, better approaches to healing, in particular that identified with the Swiss reformer Paracelsus, which was more popular and open, and favoured simpler, cheaper drug remedies [39; 133]. Physicians, complained the religious radical, Lodowick Muggleton, were ‘the greatest cheats in the world’ [126].

In critics' eyes, the universities and medical colleges had conspired to pervert English medicine, so that it provided unlimited (though largely worthless) treatment for the rich and all too little for the rest. Radicals proposed numerous schemes for reorganisation. They vowed to make medical education, knowledge and practice far more open, above all by replacing Latin with English as the language of the profession.