Online Resources: UK Medical Registers,1859-1959

If you’ve ever tried to trace a medical ancestor by wading through the printed volumes of the UK Medical Registers then you’ll be pleased to hear that after a successful trial period, Wellcome Library users now have online access to the Registers through our new subscription to Ancestry Library Edition.

The Medical Registers were published annually, and list all the doctors who were licensed to practice in the UK, including foreign doctors who qualified here. Residence, qualification and date of registration are also included. The online version contains the Registers at four-yearly intervals from 1859-1959, and is available to our registered readers both within the Library and offsite.

The Registers are part of a suite of family history sources on Ancestry Library Edition, including census records, births marriages and deaths, and parish records – all now available online to our registered readers.

More details on how to access the Registers online are available through the Library catalogue.

If you have any queries or suggestions, please email the Library Acquisitions Team on acquisitions@wellcome.ac.uk

Image: Portrait of William Henry Ackland (circa. 1825 - 1898), general practitioner of Bideford, Devon (MS.5418) 

Author: Aileen Cook

We’re trialling a new database: 100 years of UK Medical Registers, 1859-1959

The Library is constantly looking for new electronic resources to complement our printed materials. Our latest trial is to the Ancestry Library Edition, which contains the UK Medical Registers, 1859-1959. We already hold the printed Medical Register for some of that period and it is very popular with many Library users.

We hope that you can spare some time to have a look at the electronic version of the Register to help us to evaluate it and decide whether it would be a useful addition to our collections. Due to licensing restrictions we can only offer access to the Register online from PCs within the Library for the period of the trial, but if you can spare some time we’d be hugely grateful to hear what you think.

The Register can be accessed from any of the PCs in the Library. To access the Registers from the Ancestry homepage, go to "More Collections" and click on "all databases". From there, search for the "UK Medical Registers" by title or keyword. You can send us your feedback using the online form which can found in the Library catalogue record.

The trial is running until 14 October.

Image: A doctor telling a miserable hypochondriac patient that blood-letting is no longer practiced. Wood engraving after C. Keene. (Wellcome Library no. 15546i)