The Nightingale Shore Murder by Rosemary Cook Read Free Book Online

the prospect of ready employment and a reasonable income. He studied at Edinburgh University and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1860. He was entered onto the Medical Register of England for the first time in 1861; in fact, he was one of the first doctors to be required to register in this way, as a result of the 1858 Medical Registration Act. This was intended to impose some structure on the profession of medicine, which had evolved in several directions over the preceding few centuries.
    In the 17 th and 18 th centuries, ‘physicians’ were regarded as members of a learned profession, while surgeons, or ‘barber-surgeons’, were considered craftsmen. Each part of the profession had its own professional College, concerned with protecting the good name of its members, and upholding the standards of their practice. The Royal College of Physicians, founded by Henry VIII in 1518, lays claim to being the oldest medical college in England. Henry VIII also had a hand in the surgeons’ destiny, bringing together the Fellowship of Surgeons and the Company of Barbers in 1540, to create the College of Barber-Surgeons. In 1745, the surgeons parted company with the barbers to form the College of Surgeons, which received a Royal Charter in 1800 to become the Royal College of Surgeons in London – and later ‘of England’. Surgeons in Edinburgh were recognised as a craft guild as early as 1505, when they were incorporated by a ‘seal of cause’ granted by the town council of Edinburgh.
    Meanwhile, in England, Apothecary-Surgeons, with their own Society created in 1815, were generalists who undertook care of people in the community: hence GPs’ premises and consultations are still referred to as ‘surgeries.’ The 1858 Act standardised at least some aspects of these very different parts of the profession, aiming to end what was frankly described as
‘the evils of rampant quackery and illegal practice. The absence of uniformity in training or examination. The jealousies, antipathies and hostilities between members of the profession...’
Whether or not it succeeded in these aims, the Act bequeathed one very familiar aspect of modern medicine: the system of referrals from GPs in the community to consultants in hospitals. This addressed the vexed question of who ‘owns’ the patient when many different kinds of doctor are involved in their care. The result has been neatly summarised as: ‘
The physician and surgeon retained the hospital, while the GP retained the patient.’
    In October 1861, the newly-qualified Dr Offley Shore married Anna Maria Leishman at St James’ Episcopal Church in Edinburgh. She was just twenty, and the eldest of two surviving daughters of John and Hannah Leishman, a long-established Edinburgh family; her father was a ‘Writer to the Signet’, a form of solicitor, and her grandfather was a churchman. The Leishmans’ younger daughter, Offley’s sister-in-law Margaret would later marry the Baron Liugi Farina as her second husband, becoming Baroness Farina – Florence’s aunt in Tonbridge.
    Offley’s home in 1861, once he had left his parents’ house at Clifton, was in Stafford Street in Derby. He wrote a letter to the Committee of the Derbyshire General Infirmary, via the classified advertisements of the Derby Mercury newspaper of 27 th August 1861, applying for the position of Junior Physician at the hospital. The paper went on to report that Dr Shore was the only candidate for the position; and he was unanimously elected to it. The retiring Dr Heygate agreed to be his supervisor, and Offley Shore thanked the Committee most warmly for the appointment. The following year, Offley’s brother Sydney married Dr Heygate’s daughter Louisa, cementing the relationship between the two medical men even more closely. At least until around 18 months later, when Offley Shore resigned his position at the