KXYi PREFACE. 



being brought up in the profession, would deprive the country 

 of many ingenious persons ; since the history of medicine, like 

 that of other arts, exhibits instances of persons, as Sydenham, 

 Boerhaave, and others, who were originally bred in other pro- 

 fessions, and some, as Thomas Willis, and Verheyen, in the most 

 humble, who have yet proved the ornaments of the medical 

 faculty, and gradually attained to its highest honours. 



Many apothecaries themselves are averse to the provisions of 

 this i\ct, considering some of them as hardships, and are more- 

 over apprehensive of the consequences that may arise from these 

 burdens. For the restraint laid upon that mode of practising 

 physic, which is most advantageous to both the public and the 

 practitioner himself, namely, as a physician, inasmuch as his 

 prescriptions are open to investigation, by the College requiring 

 the party to have been educated for a certain time at some par- 

 ticular schools, has eventually and gradually led to the prevalence 

 of a different state of medical practice, by obliging those persons, 

 who had not been educated in the prescribed manner, to evade 

 the restraints, and, however desirous of joining the College, to 

 become the rivals of the physicians ; while the mode of evasion, 

 by imposing on these persons a commercial character, has led 

 to their giving credit for the medicines they supply, and thus 

 procured for them a preference amongst the middling classes. 

 Hence, it is supposed, there is some danger, lest the operation 

 of the burdens imposed by this Act should throw the present 

 business of the apothecaries into other channels, as the cuppers, 

 who already begin to increase in number, or the chemists and 

 druggists. 



The first hardship complained of is that which obliges all 

 country apothecaries, from even the smallest villages, after their 

 apprenticeship is expired, to go up to London, and stop there 

 for six months and upwards, which is a heavy expense, totally 

 out of the power of many, and in some cases attended with the 

 hazard of another practitioner settling, during their absence, in 

 the place : hence these must of necessity evade the Act by setting 

 up as surgeons, or as chemists and druggists, trusting to the 

 confidence their friends and acquaintance may repose in them ; 

 and thus, as their apprentices cannot in either case be received as 

 apothecaries, the number of the profession is gradually lessened. 



