The Professions

Abstract

The importance of the professions in relation to regulation is that they are an example of established and comprehensive private regulation in certain kinds of work. Nor are they mere exceptions or eccentricities: the aspiration to professional status and the control over work which it involves is a powerful one that has stimulated efforts to achieve it throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the ancient professions, notably law, the clergy and universities, have their origins in medieval times, it was only in later periods that the professions took on their modern form, with medicine in particular, arguably the most powerful of all, only succeeding in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.