If you find any healthcare workers when researching your family history there are various options for tracing their career.
Here are some top tips for tracing medical professionals in the past:
- This research guide to doctors and nurses has some really useful pointers for getting started.
- Depending on when you are looking, you could look at the census (taken every ten years, with identifiable personal detail on it from 1841) which is available up to 1921 for England, Wales and Scotland. More information about getting the best from the census here.
- You may find people listing themselves as surgeons, physicians or general practitioners, rather than doctors, so be open to using different terminology to modern professions.
- Nurses appear in a variety of guises across similar records – sometimes as private nurses in private residences, in nursing or convalescence homes, or in hospitals. It was common for nurses, almost always single women, to “live in” – so expect to find nurses living on site.
- There are often brilliant resources available for specific groups of medical practitioners, whether this is rooted in practice specialism, or the context in which they are working. There’s more information about the records of some of the Royal Colleges below. If the person you are searching for was involved in military medicine, then it’s worth checking to see if there is a service record for them within our military records. You might also consider checking regimental or unit collections too – the Museum of Military Medicine is a great place to begin.
- Finally, details of surviving records for hospitals can be found here. These are institutional records, and sometime include staff records.
If you’re tracing an individual who worked in the broader field of medicine, there are various options in terms of tracing their careers through professional sources:
- The Royal College of Physicians has some great resources on their website about tracing the history of doctors.
- The Royal College of Nursing has detailed information about tracing nurses, and midwives (as for a long time, midwives had to train as nurses and then specialise in midwifery after this initial qualification).
- The Royal College of Midwives also has resources for tracing midwives in their archives.
- The Wellcome Collection has an extensive range of collections relating to the history of medical practice and is well worth consulting.