PREFACE. xi 



the College v. Rose, for selling medicines not ordered by a phy- 

 sician to a patient, in their favour. Hence that preferable mode 

 of the practice of medicine, resting entirely in the hands of 

 prescribers, was altered, by the college confining their licences 

 exclusively to those bred up in academical learning, which, how- 

 ever ornamental to its possessor, is certainly not essential to 

 success in practice ; not considering how much better it were to 

 have had unlearned physicians for their brethren, than to 

 convert the dispensers into rivals. It seems as if the college 

 were afterwards sensible of their error, by their publishing a sta- 

 tute, inviting unlearned practitioners to be examined in the vulgar 

 tongue, in any part of physic they might choose, and offering to 

 license them for whatever department they might be found qualified. 

 Whether the state of medical practice, produced by the diffi- 

 culties thus laid upon practising as a prescriber, is of advantage 

 to the public, may be doubted ; as, from the mode adopted to 

 evade the laws respecting it, by the practitioner pretending only 

 to sell medicine, patients are frequently obliged to swallow more 

 medicines than are necessary, that the apothecary, or dispensing 

 practitioner, may be compensated for his attendance. Those 

 medicines must, in most cases, be made unpalatable, lest the 

 'patient should conceive himself to be furnished with mere slops 

 for the sake of a charge being made. And, as the medicines are 

 prepared by the practitioner himself, a patient standing in some 

 peculiar circumstances may be poisoned without much danger of 

 detection. It is but a few years since a respectable practitioner, 

 in the west of England, was tried for this crime, to which he was 

 supposed to be impelled by the desire of hastening the receipt of 

 the patient's, his mother-in-law, property ; and several similar 

 cases have occurred both in England and France. Against all 

 these disadvantages the public have only the convenience of hav- 

 ing medical attendance and medicines upon credit. It is singular 

 that the House of Lords did not, in their decision u|)on Rose's 

 case, perceive the great danger that arose from allowing the com- 

 patibility of medical practice with the dispensing of medicines, 

 which has long been forbidden in some of the best regulated con- 

 tinental states ; in order that the dispenser may serve as a check 

 upon the prescrikr, advise with him if any accidental error is 

 suspected to occur in the prescriptions, and by keeping the pre- 



