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Concept
Professional degree
Summary
A professional degree, formerly known in the US as a first professional degree, is a degree that prepares someone to work in a particular profession, practice, or industry sector often meeting the academic requirements for licensure or accreditation. Professional degrees may be either graduate or undergraduate entry, depending on the profession concerned and the country, and may be classified as bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degrees. For a variety of reasons, professional degrees may bear the name of a different level of qualification from their classification in qualifications, e.g., some UK professional degrees are named bachelor's but are at master's level, while some Australian and Canadian professional degrees have the name "doctor" but are classified as master's or bachelor's degrees.
The first doctorates were awarded in the mid twelfth century to recognise teachers (doctors) in mediaeval universities, either in civil law at the University of Bologna or in theology at the University of Paris. These were followed shortly afterwards by doctorates in canon law, and then in the thirteenth century by doctorates in medicine, grammar, logic and philosophy. These mediaeval doctorates remained, however, essentially teaching qualifications, with their major importance being the ius ubique docendi – the right to teach anywhere.
The first university medical school to be established in the United Kingdom was at the University of Edinburgh in 1726, followed in 1744 by the University of Glasgow. In 1817, Glasgow became the first British university to offer a separate degree in surgery, the Master of Surgery. However, other Scottish universities – St Andrews and the two universities in Aberdeen – also offered medical degrees, often in absentia and without examination, despite not having medical schools. In England, the two universities (Oxford and Cambridge) were only sporadically interested in medical teaching, which was mainly carried out in the London hospitals.
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