How relevant is the East Kent model to the rest of provincial southern England? This is a difficult question to answer. In theory it should be easy – a direct comparison between dioceses using the same methods – but in practice this is not possible. No other county has a collection of accounts which compares in size with that of Kent, and thus no other county can be examined in the same detail per decade as East Kent. Nor is any other collection of accounts as detailed in its medical references. Even a cursory glance at the index for other regions shows that the entries denoting medical assistance and sickness are not nearly as common for other counties as they are for East Kent.

The records of diocesan licensing also suggest that we should not expect medical services to be directly comparable across regions. In the period 1570–1649 no fewer than 31 per cent of the East Kent practitioners named in the Canterbury probate accounts were diocesan licentiates. This is a surprisingly high figure, as current thinking is that relatively few medical practitioners had a degree or a licence. For accounts dating to the period 1660–1719 the proportion was even higher, at 39 per cent. Such figures naturally lead to suspicions that the clerks writing the accounts tended only to name ecclesiastically licensed practitioners. It is more likely, however, that current thinking needs to be revised, with regard to East Kent at least, for not only were licentiates more frequently named in the probate accounts, they were also more common on the ground in Kent than is normally stated.