Postgraduate Specialism

Abstract

Having established the place of venereal diseases on the undergraduate curriculum, this chapter moves on to examine the opportunities available to doctors who wanted to augment or refresh their knowledge over the course of their medical careers. It examines the emergence of postgraduate education at the end of the nineteenth century and its effect upon the study of venereal diseases, and contextualises these issues within a wider framework of emerging specialisms. If undergraduate medical education was reflective of a wider privileging of generalist training and practice, then postgraduate education was a means of forging a new frontier of medical knowledge available through specialist study and practice. This chapter addresses the gaps in venereological knowledge that postgraduate study was attempting to fill.

Material in this chapter is reproduced from Anne Hanley, ‘Venereology at the Polyclinic: Postgraduate Medical Education Among General Practitioners in England, 1899–1914’, Medical History (2015): 199–221, by permission of Cambridge University Press.