Part 21

The first Charter of Incorporation was granted to the apothecaries by James I in 1606, but this did not separate them from their old foes, the grocers. They continued their efforts, however, and with the aid of friends at Court they obtained a new Charter in 1617, which gave them an entirely independent existence as a City Guild under the title of the Society of the Apothecaries. This is the only London guild which has from its incorporation to the present time admitted only actual apothecaries to its fraternity.

Another peculiarity claimed by one of the Company’s historians (Dr. J. Corfe: “The Apothecary”) is that the Guild of Apothecaries is the only City Company which is called a Society. He believes that this may be attributed to the supposed fact that the corporation was modelled on a similar association founded at Naples in 1540 under the name of Societa Scientifica.

The original painting by Rubens, of which the above is a copy, was in the collection of Dr. Mead, and was sold in 1754 for £115. It passed into the possession of the Earl of Bessborough and the Marquis of Lansdowne, and then through the hands of some dealers, and in 1848 was bought by the Royal College of Physicians for £33 12s. ]

Sir Theodore de Mayerne, the King’s first physician, and Gideon de Laune, pharmacien or apothecary to the Queen, Anne of Denmark, were the supporters of the apothecaries in rescuing them from the control of the grocers. Both of these men deserve honourable mention in the chronicles of British pharmacy. It happens that both were of foreign origin and of the Protestant faith, two of that eminent crowd of immigrants of high principle and distinguished ability who served England so well in the seventeenth century when they found themselves “not wanted” in France.

Mayerne was a Swiss by birth, but a Frenchman by education and adoption, and had been physician to Henri IV. But he incurred the bitter animosity of the Paris Faculty, led by the fanatic Gui Patin, partly on account of his religious heresy, and partly because he prescribed chemical medicines. By a unanimous vote the Paris College of Physicians resolved in 1603 that he must not be met by any of its members in consultation. He continued, however, to practise in Paris until an English peer whom he had treated took him to London and introduced him to James I, who made him physician to the Queen. Mayerne, however, soon returned to Paris, but in 1611 he settled in London on the invitation of the King, who made him his first physician. He had a great deal to do with the compilation of the first London Pharmacopœia, and is reputed to have introduced calomel and black wash into medical practice. Subsequently he was appointed physician to Charles I and Queen Henriette, but after the execution of the King he retired into private life, and though nominally physician to Charles II he never practised at that Court. He died at Chelsea in 1665.

Gideon de Laune was also a man of considerable influence. Dr. Corfe regards him as almost the founder of the Society of Apothecaries, but Mr. Barrett, who recently wrote a history of that Society, suggests that he could not have been so much thought of by his contemporaries, as he was only elected to the Mastership some years after the Charter had been granted, and then only after a contest. At any rate the apothecaries must have largely owed the Charter to his influence. He lived in Blackfriars and called himself a “Pharmacopœius,” but we also read of him as an importer of drugs, and it is probable that he traded as a merchant. That he was a man of position is evident from the fact that on one occasion he fetched the Queen, Anne of Denmark, from Norway.

Gideon de Laune was born at Rheims in 1565, and was brought to England as a boy by his father, who was a Protestant pastor. A Nonconformist writer of the same surname who got into trouble in the reigns of Charles II and James II, and was befriended by De Foe, referring to Gideon as a relative, says of him that when he died at the age of 97 he had near as many thousands of pounds as he had years; that he had thirty-seven children by one wife; and that his funeral was attended by sixty grandchildren. It has been ascertained, however, that his children only numbered seventeen, and that he died at the age of 94; so that the later De Laune who wrote in 1681 cannot be implicitly relied upon when figures are concerned. Another thing he tells us of Gideon is that “his famous pill is in great request to this day notwithstanding the swarms of pretenders to pill-making.”

The Grocers’ Company warmly resented the secession of the apothecaries who had been their subordinate partners so long, but their formal petition of complaint called forth a cruel snub from the King. Grocers were but merchants, said James, the business of the apothecaries was a mystery; “Wherefore I think it fitting they should be a corporation of themselves.” The grocers, however, got some of their own back a few years later when James demanded a subsidy from the city for the relief of the Palatinate. The grocers and the apothecaries were assessed at £500 between them. Towards this the apothecaries, pleading poverty, offered £20. The grocers ridiculed this offer, and having paid £300 as their share, left their old associates to find the other £200, which they had to do somehow.

About the same time the new corporation vigorously opposed an application for a Charter made by the distillers of London. The grocers supported the distillers, and the apothecaries failed in their opposition. Sir Theodore Mayerne told them that their monopoly of distillation was only intended to extend to the distillation of medicinal spirits and waters. Mr. Barrett quotes from the old records another curious instance of the contest for monopolies which was characteristic of the period. In 1620, one John Woolf Rumbler having obtained from the King a concession of the sole right of making “mercuric sublimate,” applied to the Court of Apothecaries that he might enjoy the same without their contradiction. This “upon advised consideration,” the Court refused to grant. It is not stated whether the will of the King or that of the apothecaries prevailed in the end.

The story of the jealousies which arose between the physicians and the apothecaries is a long and tedious one; innumerable pamphlets were written on both sides of the controversy, and the dispute figures in English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pope very neatly expressed the views of the physicians in the familiar verse in the “Essay on Criticism” in which, comparing the old critics of Greece who “fanned the poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire,” with those of his own day who

Against the poets their own arms they turned Sure to hate most the men from whom they learn’d,

illustrated the position by introducing the

Modern pothecaries, taught the art By doctors’ bills to play the doctors’ part, Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.

This was written in 1709.

The apothecaries strengthened their position as medical practitioners in the public esteem by remaining at their posts during the Great Plague in London in 1665 when most of the physicians fled from the stricken city. Between this date and the end of the seventeenth century the quarrel between the two sections of the profession constantly grew in bitterness. Some of the allegations of extortion made against the apothecaries are almost incredible. In Dr. Goodall’s “Historical Account of the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians against Empiricks and Unlicensed Practisers” (1684), it is reported that George Buller who gave the college some trouble in 1633 had charged 30s. each for 25 pills; £37 10s. for the boxful. Three were given to a Mrs. Style for a sore leg, and she died the same night. A Dr. Tenant prosecuted by the college in James I’s reign “was so impudent and unconscionable in the rating of his medicines that he charged £6 for one pill and the same for an apozeme.”

Dr. R. Pitt, F.R.S., in “Crafts and Frauds of Physic Exposed,” 1703 (a book written expressly to defend the establishment of dispensaries by the Physicians), states that apothecaries had been known to make £150 out of a single case, and that in a recent instance (which had apparently come before the law courts) the apothecary had made £320. In every bill of £100 Dr. Pitt says the charges were £90 more than the shop prices for the medicine.

In Jacob Bell’s “Historical Sketch of the Progress of Pharmacy in Great Britain” an apothecary’s bill for medicines for one day, supplied to a Mr. Dalby of Ludgate Hill, is quoted from a pamphlet called “The Wisdom of the Nation is Foolishness.” It is as follows:

An Emulsion, 4s. 6d. A Mucilage, 3s. 4d. Gelly of Hartshorn, 4s. Plaster to dress Blister, 1s. An Emollient Glister, 2s. 6d. An ivory pipe, armed 1s. A Cordial Bolus, 2s. 6d. The same again, 2s. 6d. A cordial draught, 2s. 4d. The same again, 2s. 4d. Another bolus, 2s. 6d. Another draught, 2s. 4d. A glass of cordial spirits, 3s. 6d. Blistering plaster to the arm, 5s. The same to the wrists, 5s. Two boluses again, 5s. Two draughts again, 4s. 8d. Another emulsion, 4s. 6d. Another pearl julep, 4s. 6d.

Mr. Dalby’s bill for five days came to £17 2s. 10d., and this was declared to be not an isolated case but illustrative of the practice of apothecaries when attending patients of the higher classes.

CONTEST BETWEEN THE PHYSICIANS AND APOTHECARIES.

In 1687 the College of Physicians adopted a resolution binding all Fellows, Candidates, and Licentiates of the College to give advice gratis to their neighbouring sick poor when desired within the city of London or seven miles round. But in view of the gross extortions of the apothecaries it was asked, What was the use of the physicians’ charity if the cost of compounding the medicines was to be prohibitory? The apothecaries, of course, denied that the examples of their charges which were quoted were at all general, and probably they were not. It was not to the interest of the apothecaries to destroy free prescribing. Indeed a proposal was made to the physicians on behalf of a numerous body of London apothecaries to accept a tariff for medicines dispensed for the poor to be fixed by the physicians themselves.

The relations of the two bodies had become, however, so strained that arrangement was no longer possible. The apothecaries had in fact obtained the upper hand. They treated many cases themselves, and calling in the physician was largely within their discretion. At this time (about 1700) the ordinary fee paid to a physician was 10s. University graduates expected more, but they too, in the majority of cases, were only too glad to take the half sovereign, and it was alleged that they would sometimes pay the apothecary who called them a percentage off this.

Such was the condition of affairs when in 1696 an influential section of the physicians, fifty-three of them, associated themselves in the establishment of Dispensaries, where medicines should be compounded and supplied to the poor at cost price. The fifty-three subscribed ten pounds each, and Dispensaries were opened at the College premises in Warwick Lane, in St. Martin’s Lane, and St. Peter’s Alley, Cornhill.

Needless to say, the war now waxed fiercer than ever. The physicians were divided among themselves, and the anti-dispensarians refused to meet the dispensarians in consultation. The apothecaries naturally recommended the anti-dispensarians to their patients, and consequently it was only the independent ones who could afford to maintain the struggle. Scurrilous pamphlets were written on both sides, and one long poem, Garth’s Dispensary, which was less venomous than most of the literature on the subject, but which as a poem had no merits which could justify the reputation it attained, complicated the struggle from the physicians’ point of view. Johnson says that in addition to its intrinsic merit it “co-operated with passions and prejudices then prevalent.” His sympathies are indicated by his remark that “it was on the side of charity against the intrigues of interest, and of regular learning against licentious usurpation of medical authority.” One line in the book (the last in the passage quoted below) has attained currency in the English language. Expressing satirically the complaints of the apothecaries, Garth says:

Our manufactures now the doctors sell, And their intrinsic value meanly tell; Nay, they discover too (their spite is such) That health, than crowns more valued, costs not much; Whilst we must shape our conduct by these rules, To cheat as tradesmen or to fail as fools.

THE APOTHECARIES WIN.

Notwithstanding the sympathy of Dr. Johnson, Pope, and many other famous contemporaries, the quarrel ended in the comparative triumph of the apothecaries.

The physicians, though reluctant to enforce what they believed to be their statutory powers, were goaded into law, and at last brought an action against a London apothecary named William Rose, who they alleged had infringed the Act passed in the reign of Henry VIII. Rose had attended a butcher in St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields named Seale, and had administered “proper medicines” to him. He had no licence from the Faculty, and in his treatment of Seale had not acted under the direction of any physician. He had neither taken nor demanded any fee for his advice.