Of course it varies by region, but in the US physicians and surgeons by and large didn't gain the prestige they have now until after the Civil War. I've spent some time reading the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal from the 1840s and 1850s, and there are many articles and letters in which physicians lament the lack of respect they get relative to the other professionals of the day, lawyers and clergymen. But remember, physicians at this time were still reading Galen and prescribing antimony and Calomel (mercury), not to mention bloodletting! And surgery was all about speed, because there were no anesthetics. In spite of the fact that both Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) and Dr. Charles Knowlton published articles theorizing about contagion (Holmes: "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever," 1841 in the New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery and Knowlton: "Erysipelas and Puerperal Fever," 1843 in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal), there wasn't really a germ theory of disease until the 1860s (Pasteur) and 1870s (Lister). I guess that's a long-winded way of saying prestige was probably tied to effectiveness.

Funny side-note: because licensed physicians were so dependent on ancient texts like Galen, they bashed the upstarts who pushed ideas like hydrotherapy, herbalism, and homeopathy by calling them empirics.