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.
[Illustration: SIR THEODORE MAYERNE.
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 12_s._
]
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 30_s._
each for 25 pills; £37 10_s._ 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, 4_s._ 6_d._ A Mucilage, 3_s._ 4_d._ Gelly of
Hartshorn, 4_s._ Plaster to dress Blister, 1_s._ An Emollient
Glister, 2_s._ 6_d._ An ivory pipe, armed 1_s._ A Cordial
Bolus, 2_s._ 6_d._ The same again, 2_s._ 6_d._ A cordial
draught, 2_s._ 4_d._ The same again, 2_s._ 4_d._ Another
bolus, 2_s._ 6_d._ Another draught, 2_s._ 4_d._ A glass of
cordial spirits, 3_s._ 6_d._ Blistering plaster to the arm,
5_s._ The same to the wrists, 5_s._ Two boluses again, 5_s._
Two draughts again, 4_s._ 8_d._ Another emulsion, 4_s._ 6_d._
Another pearl julep, 4_s._ 6_d._
Mr. Dalby’s bill for five days came to £17 2_s._ 10_d._, and this was
declared to be not an isolated case but illustrative of the practice of
apothecaries when attending patients of the higher classes.