Professional Registration

Abstract

A SIGNIFICANT feature of professional life in post-War Europe to which the Committee on Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations has several times directed attention, is the tendency of professional workers to organise themselves in defence associations and frequently to attempt to establish a register of those qualified to practise, accompanied by legal restriction of professional practice to such persons. The case of the accountant, against which a Departmental Committee has recently reported, is the latest in sequence of a series of unsuccessful attempts to establish such registers in Britain. Restrictive registration was granted to the profession of dentistry in 1921. An architects registration bill was unsuccessfully introduced into the House of Lords in November 1928, and a similar attempt to obtain registration of opticians proved abortive in 1927, strong opposition being displayed in the House of Commons by the medical profession. In the profession of science, like tendencies are to be discovered, notably in the profession of chemistry, and it is probably largely the anomalous position in which the chemist finds himself in Great Britain, where the title of chemist is already restricted by law to the pharmacist, that has delayed the presentation of a bill before Parliament. The Pharmacy Bill which was presented to Parliament by certain private members in 1923, although it proposed to restrict the title of chemist to persons registered by the Institute of Chemistry, was drafted without consulting the professional organisations of chemists, such as the Institute of Chemistry and the British Association of Chemists, and did not represent a professional movement for registration.