In the introduction to John Brown's Elements of Medicine (1795), the Bristol physician Thomas Beddoes categorized the medical faculty into genus and species. The first genus, ‘doctors as desirous, at least, of doing good and extending knowledge, as of amassing wealth’ included such species as the ‘philanthropic doctor’ who was ‘equally sensible of the importance and imperfection of medicine’, the ‘shy philanthropist’ who ‘keeps too closely retired from public notice’, and the ‘renegado philanthropist’ who, fed up with the ‘helpless state’ of the medical art, applied instead ‘his talents to literature or science’. The second genus, ‘mere collectors of fees, regardless of medical science’ included such species as the ‘bullying Doctor’ who ‘looks big, struts, swaggers, [and] swears’, the ‘solemn doctor with garb, voice, gestures, and equipage, contrived to overawe weak imaginations’, the ‘club hunting doctor’ usually found ‘talking much and loud’, the ‘burr doctor’ eager to fasten ‘himself upon you as tenaciously as the heads of the noisome weed’, and the ‘Adonis wheedling doctor with a handsome face’ that ‘flourishes at watering places’. While mostly written in jest, Bed-does's satirical classification of doctors highlights the disjointed nature of the medical profession in the late eighteenth century. Although broad differences between barber-surgeons, apothecaries and physicians are well documented in the historiography, Beddoes's categorization reminds historians of the further diversity of practitioners within these groups. This study argues the importance of additional classificatory refinement with regard to Britain's late eighteenth-century nerve doctors.