421 



APOTHECARIES, COMPANY OF. 



APOTHECARIES, COMPANY OF. 



addressing ourselves before." (Beattie, ' Elements of Moral Science.') 

 The term is also used, less properly, for an address to some absent or 

 inanimate object, as in * Julius Caesar," Act iii. Sc. I. 



O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, 

 That I am meek and gentle with these butchers. 



It is also used to express the contraction or division of part of a 

 word, as bora' for borough, learn'd for learned. This practice of division, 

 intolerable in a language already overburdened with consonants, was 

 much more frequent in the writers of a century, or a century and a 

 half ago, than now ; and seems to have been affected to give an air of 

 negligence and familiarity to their style. It ought seldom to be used 

 except in verse, and very sparingly there. The comma, by which the 

 final of the genitive case is separated from the word, is also called an 

 apostrophe, as in " Israel's monarch." 



APOTHECARIES, COMPANY OF, one of the incorporations of the 

 city of London. In England, in former times, an apothecary appears 

 to have been the common name for a general practitioner of medicine, 

 a chief part of whose business it was, probably in all cases, to keep a 

 shop for the sale of medicines. In 1345, a person of the name of 

 Courxiig de Gangeland, on whom Edward III. then settled a pension of 

 sixpence a day for life, for his attendance on his Majesty some time 

 before while he lay sick in Scotland, is called in the grant, printed in 

 Rymer's ' Foedera,' an apothecary of London. But at this date, and 

 for a long time after, the profession of physic was entirely unregulated. 

 It was not till after the accession of Henry VIII. that the different 

 branches of the profession came to be distinguished, and that each had 

 its province and particular privileges assigned to it by the law. An 

 Act of Parliament was passed in the third year of that king (1511), by 

 which, in consideration, as it is stated, of " the great inconvenience 

 which did ensue by ignorant persons practising physic or surgery, to 

 the grievous hurt, damage, and destruction of many of the king's liege 

 people," it was ordered that no one should practise as surgeon or 

 physician in the city of London, or within seven miles of it, until he 

 had been first examined, approved, and admitted by the Bishop of 

 London, or the Dean of St. Paul's, who were to call in to assist them 

 in the examination, " four doctors of physic, and of surgery other expert 

 persons in that faculty." In 1518, the physicians were for the first 

 time incorporated, and their college founded, evidently with the view 

 that it should exercise a general superintendence and authority over all 

 the branches of the profession. In 1540, the surgeons were also incor- 

 porated and united, as they continued to be till the beginning of the 

 present century, with the barbers. The two associations thus estab- 

 lished appear, however, to have very soon begun to overstep their 

 jurisdiction. It was found necessary, in 1543, to pass an Act for the 

 toleration and protection of the numerous irregular practitioners, who 

 did not belong to either body, but who probably formed the ordinary 

 professors of the healing art throughout the kingdom. In this curious 

 statute, the former Act of 1511 is declared to have been passed, 

 " amongst other things, for the avoiding of sorceries, witchcraft, and 

 other inconveniences ; " and not a little censure is directed against the 

 licensed and associated surgeons for the mercenary spirit in which they 

 are alleged to have acted, while much praise is bestowed upon the 

 unincorporated practitioners for their charity in giving the poor the 

 benefit of their skill and care, and for the great public usefulness of 

 their labours generally. The import of the enactment is expressed in 

 its title, which is, " An Act that Persons being no common Surgeons 

 may minister outward Medicines." The persons thus tolerated in the 

 ailministration of outward medicines, of course comprehended those 

 who kept shops for the sale of drugs, to whom the name of apothecaries 

 was now exclusively applied. The acceptation of the name, as thus 

 confined, may be gathered from Shakspere's delineation of the apothe- 

 cary in 'Romeo and Juliet' (published in 1597), as one whose business 

 was " culling of simples," who kept a " shop," the " shelves " of which 

 were filled with " green earthen pots," &c., and who was resorted to as 

 a dealer in all sorts of chemical preparations. 



It is evident, however, that persons dealing in drugs and simples, 

 who would thence be supposed to know more of their qualities than 

 their neighbours, must have been often applied to for advice. There is 

 a curious chapter, added to an edition of R. Recorde's ' Urinal of Physik," 

 stated to have been written in the reign of Elizabeth, by a physician. 

 and bearing the date, apparently as a reprint, of 1662. The title of the 

 book is, ' A Detection of some Faults in Unskilful Physicians, ignorant 

 and careless Apothecaries, and unknown running Chirurgeons." After 

 some complaints of unlearned physicians, he gives 'seven articles, 

 which he had submitted to the Bishop of Salisbury, in which city he 

 dwelt, for the reformation of matters. The first is, that no physician 

 be allowed to practise without a licence from some university or the 

 i' "f the diocese. The second is, "that no chirurgcon should 

 practise his chirurgery unless he could read and write, and have know- 

 of the simples belonging to hi.s art. And that he presume not to 

 let Mood, or undertake any hard cure, without the physician's counsel 

 if he may conveniently have it." This " chirurgeon " seems not to 

 differ much from a general practitioner. The third article recommend: 

 that no apothecary be permitted to " minister of his own head, or 

 ordain any purgation or other composition of physic for any man." The 

 remaining articles recommend that a court of physicians should examine, 

 t -in let, and punish any offenders against these regulations. According 



,o the physician's own account, the apothecaries perhaps, however, 

 only in Salisbury took very high ground, and had their pretensions 

 recognised by at least some physicians. He says, " What rnaketh 

 many apothecaries now-a-days to set so little by the physician ? This 

 is one chief cause : they play the physicians themselves ; they give and 

 minister medicines of their own device (God wot a mad device) indiffer- 

 ently unto all men ; yea, and the more ignorant they are, the bolder 

 ;hey be ; for who is so bold as blind Bayard ? Many of them will not 

 tick to look in waters, and not be ashamed, even in the physician's pre- 

 ence, to ordain this or that medicine for any kind of disease. If any phy- 

 Ician do gently admonish them of the faults, and specially of giving 

 medicines after their own brain, they will say that they may as well 

 prescribe medicines as physicians do sometimes use to make them." 

 He adds, in another part of his account of the apothecaries, " it were 

 ^ood also that no kind of poison should be pounded or dissolved in any 

 mortars occupied daily for the shop, for thereof hath chanced much 

 evil." Carelessness, it would seem, is not the growth of to-day. 



The apothecaries of London were at length incorporated by James I. 

 on the 9th of April, 1606, and united with the Company of Grocers. 

 They remained thus united till the 6th of December, 1617, when 

 they received a new charter, forming them into a separate company, 

 under the designation of the Master, Wardens, and Society of the 

 Art and Mystery of Apothecaries of the City of London. This is 

 the charter which still constitutes them one of the city companies, 

 although various subsequent Acts of Parliament have materially changed 

 the character of the society. 



It appears to have been only a few years before the close of the 

 17th century, that the apothecaries, at least in London and ita 

 neighbourhood, began generally to prescribe, as well as to dispense 

 medicines. This encroachment was strongly resisted by the College of 

 Physicians, who, by way of retaliation, established a dispensary for the 

 sale of medicines to the poor at prime cost, at their hall in Warwick 

 Lane. A paper controversy of great animation rose out of this 

 measure ; but the numerous tracts which were issued on both sides 

 are now all forgotten, with the exception of Garth's burlesque epic 

 poem, entitled ' The Dispensary,' first published in 1697. The apothe- 

 caries, however, may be considered as having made good the position 

 they had taken ; although for a considerable time their pretensions 

 continued to be looked upon as of a somewhat equivocal character. 

 In 1703, the House of Lords decided, in the case of William Rose (we 

 quote from the ' London Journal of Medicine ' for May, 1850), " that 

 the duty of an apothecary consisted not only in compounding and 

 dispensing, but also in directing and ordering the remedies employed 

 in the treatment of disease." 



Addison, in the ' Spectator,' No. 195, published in 1711, speaks of 

 the apothecaries as the common medical attendants of the sick, and as 

 performing the functions both of physician and surgeon. After men- 

 tioning blistering, cupping, bleeding, and the inward applications em- 

 ployed as expedients to make luxury consistent with health, he says, 

 " The apothecary is perpetually employed in countermining the cook 

 and the vintner." On the other hand Pope, in his ' Essay on Criticism,' 

 published the same year, has the following lines in illustration of the 

 domination which he asserts to have been usurped by the critic over 

 the poet : 



' So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art 

 By doctors' bills to play the doctor's part ; 

 Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, 

 Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.' 



Nor, indeed, did the apothecaries themselves contend at thia time for 

 permission to practise as medical advisers and attendants any further 

 than circumstances seemed to render it indispensable. In a cleverly 

 written tract in their defence, published in 1 724, and apparently the 

 production of one of themselves, entitled ' Pharmacopeias Justificati ; 

 or the Apothecaries vindicated from the Imputation of Ignoranco, 

 wherein it is shown that an Academical Education is nowise necessary 

 to qualify a man for the Practice of Physic,' we find the following 

 opinion expressed (p. 31), " As to apothecaries practising, the miserable 

 state of the sick poor, till some other provision is made for their relief, 

 seems sufficiently to warrant it, so long as it is confined to them." We 

 may here observe, that the custom of persons being licensed by the 

 bishops to practise medicine within their dioceses continued to subsist 

 at least to about the middle of the last century. It is exclaimed 

 against as a great abuse in a tract entitled ' An Address to the College 

 of Physicians,' published in 1747. 



It has been stated in various publications, that the order of dealers 

 in medicines, known as chemists or druggists, first made their appear- 

 ance about the end of the last century. As they very soon began to 

 prescribe as well as to dispense, the rivalry with which they were thus 

 met was as eagerly opposed by the regular apothecaries, as their own 

 encroachments had in the first instance been by the physicians. In 

 certain resolutions passed by a meeting of members of the Apothecaries' 

 Company on the 20th of November, 1812, among other causes which 

 are asserted to have of late years contributed to degrade the profession, 

 is mentioned the intrusion of pretenders of every description ; " Even 

 druggists," it is said, " and their hired assistants, visit and administer to 

 the sick ; their shops are accommodated with what are denominated 

 private surgeries ; and, as an .additional proof of their presumption 



