452 
Landmarks  of  Pharmacy. 
j  Am.  Jour.  Pharni. 
\     October,  1913. 
gredients  from  which  their  medicines  were  prepared,  to  view  in 
their  shops  for  a  stated  period,  in  order  that  physicians  might 
inspect  them  and  approve  of  their  quality. 
The  separation  of  the  grocers  from  the  apothecaries  in  Great 
Britain  by  royal  edict  in  1617  is  a  matter  of  history,  and  it  is  a 
matter  of  history  also  that  the  apothecaries'  guild  was  one  of  the 
few  English  guilds  which  remained  true  to  its  name  and  ad- 
mitted to  its  membership  only  actual  apothecaries.  The  apothe- 
caries of  England,  however,  after  being  freed  from  the  supervising 
authority  of  the  grocers,  became  quite  powerful  and  soon  en- 
croached upon  the  rights  and  privileges  of  the  physicians  in 
diagnosing  and  prescribing.  The  year  1687  saw  the  beginning  of 
a  great  contest  between  the  physicians  and  apothecaries,  which  was 
not  settled  until  1703,  when  by  judicial  decision  the  apothecaries 
were  given  the  right  to  treat  minor  ailments. 
Internal  dissensions  in  the  Guild  later  subdivided  it  into  the 
apothecaries  proper,  who  retained  all  of  the  rights  of  -  prescribing 
under  certain  circumstances  and  into  chemists  and  druggists,  who 
did  not  share  this  privilege.  A  somewhat  similar  subdivision  into 
classes  seems  to  have  persisted  in  Germany  and  some  other 
European  countries,  where  the  one  class  is  permitted  to  compound 
and  dispense  drugs  and  medicines  and  poisons  of  all  kinds,  while 
the  other  is  restricted  to  the  sale  of  a  limited  class  of  articles. 
The  foregoing  material  is  by  no  means  new  or  original  but  has 
been  prepared  with  the  aid  of  several  of  the  available  works  upon 
the  history  of  pharmacy,  particularly  the  recently  published 
Chronicles  of  Pharmacy  by  A.  C.  Wootton.  The  excuse  for  the 
presentation  of  this  article  is  that  few  pharmacists  have  more 
than  a  hazy  idea  of  the  history  of  their  ancient  and  honorable  pro- 
fession. The  books  with  which  they  are  familiar  do  not  treat  of 
the  subject,  the  works  which  do  are  not  very  numerous  and  it  is 
only  through  occasional  articles  found  in  the  pharmaceutical  jour- 
nals that  the  pharmacist  knows  his  profession  has  a  history  at  all. 
Inasmuch  as  many  of  the  problems  of  pharmacy  to-day  are 
hundreds  and  some  of  them  thousands  of  years  old  and  have 
been  solved  at  various  periods  in  its  history  with  a  greater  or 
lesser  degree  of  success,  and  for  the  reason  that  a  closer  study 
of  this  history  may  throw  additional  light  upon  our  present  day 
problems  and  perhaps  aid  in  their  solution,  the  foregoing  facts  are 
presented,  not  only  because  they  are  interesting  in  themselves, 
