274 PROGRESS OF PHARMACY IN GREAT BRITAIN. 
Dr. Pitt, six years after the establishment of the dis- 
pensaries, in his pamphlet entitled " The Craft and Fraud 
of Physic Exposed^^^ states, that the three dispensaries 
made up about twenty thousand prescriptions annually, 
and that the doses one with the other might average a 
penny a piece. 
The next year, 1704, an apothecary published a small 
book called Tentamen Medicinale, or an enquiry into 
the differences between Dispensarians and Apothecaries, 
wherein the latter are proved capable of a skilful Composi- 
tion 0¥ M-KDicmEs, and a rational practice of Physick^ 
to which are added some Proposals to prevent their future 
increase,^' in which he takes up the charges of Dr. Pitt, 
endeavours to disprove some of his assertions, and remarks 
that " when a physician has got a guinea for his visit, it 
seldom much concerns his honour or conscience how the 
apothecary gets a shilling for his medicines." 
This war of words, which long continued, only tended 
to widen the breach between the physicians and apotheca- 
ries, and is particularly interesting to pharmaceutists, as 
the origin of their rise and progress as a distinct class of the 
medical body in England. The dispensaries prospered and 
increased, the assistants at first instructed by physicians in 
the crude pharmacy of the period, necessarily improved 
their art by confining their attention exclusively to it. The 
physicians having accomplished, in great measure, their 
object, were not disposed to assume the trouble and over- 
sight of the dispensaries longer than was necessary, and the 
individuals who had charge of them, on the contrarj?-, were 
strongly disposed to assume the independent condition of 
masters. These persons were therefore the original 
" Chemists and Druggists " of England, the progenitors of 
that very extensive body now represented by the Pharma- 
ceutical Society. 
