This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Vivienne Marcus, got a medical degree once. With due respect to my non-British chums, there is a tradition in the UK and Commonwealth countries that surgeons (proudly) carry the title Mr or Miss (sometimes Ms). This goes back centuries, to the days when physicians went to medical school and became doctors of medicine. Surgeons were (in the main) uneducated practitioners who learned their trade by apprenticeship and did not have a medical degree. There was for a while a Company of Barbers and Surgeons, founded in 1540. And even the original Hippocratic Oathsays “I will not cut someone suffering from stones", i.e. I swear I won't do surgery! It’s one of those perplexing historical quirks that Britain does quite well; the irony being that medical students work hard to be called Dr, then work hard to be called Mr all over again as surgeons. This practice seems to still be the norm. Physicians, psychiatrists, radiologists and all other doctors stick with Dr as their title. Source
