FIRST MENTION OF.--A POOR SPECIMEN.--ELIZABETHAN.--KING JAMES I.
[VI.].--ALLSPICE AND ALOES, SUGAR AND TARTAR EMETIC.--WAR.--PHYSICIAN
VS. APOTHECARY.--IGNORANCE.--STEALING A TRADE.--A LAUGHABLE
PRESCRIPTION.--"CASTER ILE."--MODERN DRUG SWALLOWING.--MISTAKES.--
"STEALS THE TOOLS ALSO."--SUBSTITUTES.--"A QUID."--A "SMELL" OF PATENT
MEDICINES.--"A SAMPLE CLERK."
There are few occupations wherein Old Time has wrought so few changes as
in that of the apothecary's. What it was four hundred years ago it is
to-day! Who first invented its weights, measures, and symbols, I am unable
to say; but it is a fact that they remain the same as when first made
mention of by the earliest writers on the subject.
Drop into the "corner drug store,"--and what corner has none!--examine the
balances, the tables of weights and measures, the graduating glass, the
signs for grains, scruples, ounces, and pounds, and you will find them the
same as those used by the earliest known _medical_ apothecaries, by those
of the Elizabethan period, or when King Lear (Lyr) said, "Give me an ounce
of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination; there's money for
thee."
The money has changed; _names_ of drugs are somewhat altered; some new
ones have taken the place of old ones; prescriptions changed in quality;
but quantities, and modes of expressing them, are unchanged.
"In the middle ages an apothecary was the keeper of any shop or warehouse,
and an officer appointed to take charge of a magazine."--_Webster._
We have good grounds for supposing this to have been the case in the time
of the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem, more that two thousand years
ago. Nehemiah informs us that the son of an apothecary assisted in
"fortifying Jerusalem unto the broad wall." Was not this the office of an
overseer, or "keeper of a magazine"? Various artisans were employed to
perform certain portions of the work, and who more appropriate or better
qualified to oversee the rebuilding of the fortifications than "an officer
appointed to take charge of the magazines"?
One more reference we draw from Scripture,[2] viz., in Exodus xxxvii. 29,
where "the holy anointing oil" (not for medicine, but for the tabernacle),
"and the pure incense of sweet spices" (not medical), "were made according
to the work [book?] of the apothecary." This, however, no more implies
that the said "apothecary" was a medical man, a dispenser of physic, or
versed in medical lore, than that the maker of shewbread (Lev. xxiv. 5)
was necessarily a pharmacist.
In fact, there seems to have been no need of an apothecary, as medicine
dispenser, until about the latter part of the thirteenth century.
The oldest known work on compounding medicines was written by Nicolaus
Mynepsus, who died in the commencement of the fourteenth century.
The first apothecaries were merely growers and dispensers of herbs, and
were but a poor and beggarly set.
Shakspeare's delineation of the "_poor apothecary of Mantua_," in Romeo
and Juliet, so completely answers the description of the whole "kit" of
druggists of the times, that we may be pardoned in quoting him.