SOME support is given to the conclusions reached in this work by other studies of different professions in the eighteenth century. In his unpublished Fellowship dissertation on the English Parish Clergy, 1660-1800, in the Library of Trinity College, Mr P. A. Bezodis describes the development from the position in which the country clergyman was a man of no social prestige, when there was a great and almost impassable gulf fixed between him and those who occupied the high places of the Church, to the point at which, although vast economic and social differences persisted, yet all were conscious of belonging to a single professional body, and when they were more liable to be criticised for neglecting the duties of the cloth than for being socially pretentious upstarts. Dr B. M. Hamilton, in her London Ph.D. thesis dealt with the Medical Professions in the Eighteenth Century. (The results are summarised in an article in Economic History Review, 2nd series, IV.) She discerns two strands in the development among the doctors, a revolution in medical training, and a growth of professional feeling. She writes: As a result of these two movements and of the great expansion of the middle classes, by 1800 the professional scene of a hundred years before had been completely transformed: the apothecaries, once mere tradesmen and the ‘servants of the physician’, had become practising doctors; the surgeons had dissociated themselves from the barbers, and the ‘pure’ or hospital surgeon had become a specialist of high reputation; whilst the physicians, originally few in numbers and of a good social position, had received an influx of hard-working middle-class graduates from Leyden and Edinburgh. All types met in the wards of the London and provincial hospitals. Professional honour, etiquette and status were now matters of the liveliest debate, and by the end of the century a man could achieve social standing as well as reputation through his profession. In 1660 a physician was a gentlemen, while apothecaries and surgeons were mere craftsmen: by 1800 it is possible to see them all as part of the new professional classes.