66 
SELECTED ARTICLES. 
physician, inasmuch as it not only conferred the privilege 
of practising, but also of compounding and dispensing medi- 
cine, which no graduate of a University, save Oxford and Cam- 
bridge is permitted to do, unless a fellow or licentiate of the 
Royal College of Physicians of London, in which case the 
provision is nugatory, as this body prevents its members 
from acting as general practitioners and dispensing medicines. 
Mr. Nussey, indeed, states in his evidence that it was decided 
in the reign of Queen Anne, in the case of the College of 
Physicians, against an individual of the name of Rose, that 
an apothecary was competent to ascertain the nature of a 
disease and to treat it, and that he can refer to some proof of 
that ; into which, however, he does not enter. In answer 
to the question, whether this decision goes so far as to 
define what an apothecary is now ? he says *^at the present 
moment, there are very few individuals practising pharmacy 
exclusively, perhaps not more than half a dozen, in the 
whole town. But the apothecary strictly is still an in- 
individual who simply attends the sick and treats disease." 
The examination then proceeds. " Is he a person who attends 
an individual affected with some internal disease, not requiring 
external or manual aid, who prescribes for the cure of such 
complaint and supplies the medicine ? He is. The supplying 
of medicine is an essential part of it ? That is as it may hap- 
pen. In my situation in life, I am sometimes called upon to 
prescribe ; to give my opinions without sending medicine. 
You are not the only instance of that ? I speak of myself, 
there are others. What is the definition of an apothecary as 
distinguished from other practitioners ? That which the 
chairman has already stated, is the meaning I apprehend of 
the word apothecary." 
So then, the apothecary, according to Mr. Nussey, the 
chairman of the Apothecaries' Company, acts in many respects 
as a physician. He treats any internal disease not requiring 
external or manual aid. Now this will evidently prevent 
him from treating the greater number of inflammatory com- 
plaints, in fact all complaints which require blood-letting in any 
form. Definitions,asDr. Johnsonlongago remarked, are hazard- 
