Book Review

The general introduction states that “this series is designed to provide family and other historians with the basic information provided by the records of apprenticeship of a number of the Livery Companies”. Comprising four indexes, namely apprenticeships, masters, places and trades/occupations, it is, interestingly, the only volume in the series to date that has not been compiled by Chris Webb. Clearly Patrick Wallis has had to conform to a standard format in terms of the content, structure and style of each index, and users are expected to be familiar with livery-company terminology. In some respects the apprenticeships index constitutes an early version of the Medical Students' Register but, despite the brief explanation for their exclusion, freedom admissions (where known) would have been a useful addition. Cross-referencing between the apprenticeships and masters indexes does not yield a foolproof means of establishing the career path of an individual apothecary: between 1617 and 1669 the Society permitted only shop-owning freemen to take apprentices (when the ratio of apprentices to freemen was about 2:1), but not all did so. Also, Patrick Wallis's choice of end-date appears anomalous and arbitrary. The Society's Apprenticeship Binding Book was opened in 1694 so it would have been helpful to extend the exercise another twenty-five years, or even to 1700, which is the starting-point of Eighteenth century medics, ed. P J and R V Wallis (Project for Historical Biobibliography, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1988, 2nd ed.). Although the information is limited, the data painstakingly extracted by Patrick Wallis has significant research potential, possibly more so for academic rather than family historians. Indeed, the emergent social profile of apothecaries' apprentices based on their parents' occupations is fascinating, for it explodes both the myth of apothecaries' humble, artisan origins and the lowly professional rating usually accorded this trade.