Due to its ascendancy as the administrative and commercial center of early modern England, London experienced sustained growth in the latter half of the sixteenth century, as waves of rural immigrants sought to enhance their material conditions by tapping into the city's bustling occupational and civic networks. The resultant crowded urban landscape fostered mounting demand for medical services, since injuries and ailments, ranging from consumption to contusions, proliferated within the city's teeming streets and markets. Due to consistently strong patient demand and the conventions of English common law, which stipulated that legal authorization to practice medicine was solely contingent upon patient consent, peddling medical services to the city's ill and infirm became an increasingly appealing—and potentially lucrative—venture. Consequently, London's largely unregulated medical marketplace—characterized by competition for patients, the mounting influence of print culture, and the emergence of small commercial networks—attracted a diverse array of practitioners, including university-educated physicians, who focused on treating ailments of the inner body by prognosticating and prescribing medicine; guild-licensed surgeons, who treated ailments ranging from broken bones to venereal disease through direct manual manipulation of the body; and a medley of specialist and itinerant practitioners, who were neither licensed by city authorities noraffiliated with established livery companies.
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