From the publication of the first chapter in Blackwood's in August 1830 to the appearance of a ‘People's Edition’ in 1854, Warren's Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician was an international literary sensation. Written from the perspective of a late physician who recounts the ‘secret history’ of the medical profession, including his own ‘Early Struggles’ to become a prominent physician in London, the series consisted of sketches of notable medical cases, which range from the macabre to the sentimental. The first separately published volumes appeared in America, under the title Affecting Scenes; Being Passages from the Diary of a Physician (1831), prior to the publication of the fi rst Edinburgh edition in 1832. It went through at least seven editions in Britain prior to the publication of the People's Edition, and was translated into French and German. According to Warren's letters to Blackwood, one chapter was even ‘translated in to the native Cherokee language!!!’

This period of immense popular currency coincides with the key decades for the professionalisation of medicine in Britain. Between 1830 and 1858, ‘medical knowledge became more scientific, medical education more systematic, and the medical profession more unified’. Prior to the Medical Act of 1858, elite medical corporations, the highest ranking of which was the Royal College of Physicians of London, controlled the licensing of practitioners, but the act created the General Medical Council and made registration with the GMC the new benchmark for professionalism. As Magali Sarfatti Larson notes, this represented ‘a victory of the middle class against aristocratic privilege’. Specialist scientific knowledge, gained through a systematic medical education and evidenced by registration with the GMC, became the mark of the ‘regular’ practitioner (finally distinguishing him from the ‘fringe’ or ‘quack’ practitioners with whom he competed in the medical marketplace), and the traditional tripartite hierarchy between physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries became increasingly irrelevant.