Approximately how many medical practitioners worked in London between 1580 and 1600?

• A. 300
• B. 800
• C. 500
• D. 1000

Answer: (C)

The number of medical practitioners in London during 1580–1600 is best thought of in the hundreds, not thousands. In this period, medical work was carried out by physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, and midwives, all operating within a regulated urban economy. London’s population was around 150,000, and the regulated medical market depended on guilds and licensing, which kept the total among a relatively small pool of professionals. Historians, drawing on licensing rolls, guild records, and urban inventories, estimate roughly five hundred practitioners working in the city in this period. That scale fits the evidence from regulatory records and the size of the city, whereas figures around three hundred or a thousand are harder to reconcile with those sources, and eight hundred or more would imply a larger, more densely staffed medical field than the records suggest.