The conjoint was a basic medical qualification in the United Kingdom administered by the United Examining Board. It is now no longer awarded. The Conjoint Board was superseded in 1994 by the United Examining Board, which lost its permission to hold qualifying medical examinations after 1999. Medical education at the London Teaching Hospitals began centuries before there was a university in London to award medical degrees. Those who had taken BAs at Oxford or Cambridge, or occasionally started their pre-clinical education at universities further afield, could return there to take medical examinations, but it was open to most to take the examinations of the London medical corporations. As the early 19th century law restricting medical employment in the British military to those who had qualifications in both medicine and surgery was taken to require diplomas from different organisations, it became customary to take both the Licence of the Society of Apothecaries (LSA) and the Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (MRCS). These corporations diverged: the Society of Apothecaries added surgery to their examination, to grant a Licence in Medicine and Surgery (LMSSA) as a complete qualification. The surgeons then teamed up with the Royal College of Physicians of London who paired their Licentiate diploma (LRCP) with the MRCS to create the English Conjoint Diploma in 1884. The London LRCP had previously been a means for Bachelors or licentiates in medicine from Oxford and Cambridge (and a few MDs from elsewhere) to qualify to practise in London as physicians (i.e. internal medicine specialists, as distinct from surgeons or apothecaries). The old LRCP also allowed the holder by custom to be addressed as "doctor" without holding a university doctorate: this privilege became generalised in the 19th century to all licentiates and Bachelors of Medicine. The nomenclature of the diplomas may have contributed to the nearly-obsolete practice of general practitioners styling themselves as "Physician and Surgeon": previously they were mostly regarded as Apothecaries. There were also Scottish and Irish conjoint qualifications: the former became known as the Triple Qualification. In the 19th century, the new University of London Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degrees were regarded as more academic than the Royal Colleges' diplomas, so many people qualified and started practice with the Conjoint before taking the M.B. and B.S. a year or two later. This paralleled the practice in some European countries of taking a state medical