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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

It’s not a doctorate, even though the d stands for doctor. The J.D. is kind of an odd special case. The use of Dr. for a J.D. would be contrary to custom and make no sense. It is a vocational certification, requiring no research nor contribution to knowledge—just two to three years of classwork.

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Doctor on it’s own doesn’t require research. What needs research is Ph.D for “doctor of philosophy” more specifically “philosophiae doctor.”

M.D. is “Medical Doctor” other examples are D.M.A. “Doctor of Musical Arts” for music performers and Ed.D. “Doctor of Education” which is closest to the original meaning of Doctor. You also have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Arts and a few others.

PS: While the Ph.D. is the most common doctoral degree in the United States, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation recognize numerous research-oriented doctoral degrees such as the D.A. as "equivalent",[1][2] and do not discriminate between them.

> It is a vocational certification, requiring no research nor contribution to knowledge—just two to three years of classwork.

The same is true of an M.D. though with four years. They’re both doctorates.

An MD is the first degree one earns in the subject. It takes four years to earn. It used to be a bachelor's degree: MB or MBBS. In the modern era, the premed requirements pushing total medical education to five and a half years probably justifies making the degree a master's degree. The residencies and fellowships that physicians do after earning the MD that are virtually required for any physician to practice probably make calling physicians "doctor" appropriate.

Still, calling the MD a doctorate is questionable.

We call doctors “doctors” not because of the “D” in MD but because they are doctors.

We call physicians "doctors" because the profession aggressively pushed the title on the public in an era where modern medicine was emerging from quackery. The title means "teacher" and was previously used for people who were especially learned.

Thanks. I’m not aware of how the term has traveled through history, so this is interesting. I just meant that, for most people, “doctor” is almost synonymous with physician, but, as you say, this may be more recent than I thought.

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