368 LETTER TO 



author of our religion, we are not to petition for 

 strength to resist temptation ; man's presump- 

 tuous confidence in his own powers might have 

 been heightened by such a permission : but we 

 are humbly to beg our heavenly father not to 

 lead us into it, hereby confessing our insuf- 

 ficiency for the contest, whenever it shall occur. 

 I do not, however, my Lord, wish to convey 

 an opinion, that physicians become dishonest in 

 the situations which I have described ; my de- 

 sign is fully answered, if I have rendered it pro- 

 bable, by stating the difficulties in which they 

 are frequently involved, that their temptations 

 to lay aside the character of men of high ho- 

 nour, are sometimes too great for resistance* 

 I now add, that proofs of their actually yielding 

 to those temptations are furnished by what we 

 daily hear of their needless visits to sick persons, 

 their rapacity with respect to fees, and their ser- 

 vility to apothecaries*. When these, or similar 



* The present division of medical practice in this country, 

 between physicians and apothecaries, did not commence in 

 London, until some time after the separation of the latter 

 from the grocers, in l6l7 and was not firmly established, 

 before the great plague in 1 665, during which, by far the 

 greater part of the physicians having fled into the country, 

 the apothecaries were left with almost the entire care of the 

 sick. These facts were at least advanced in a controversy, 

 which existed about the end of the last century, respecting 

 the title of apothecaries to practise medicine, and were not 



