From this period the apothecaries became recognised medical
practitioners, the Society granted medical diplomas, and a hundred
years later (1815) they obtained an Act which gave them powers against
other persons similar to those which the physicians thought they
possessed against them. Persons not qualified by them were forbidden
to “act or practise as apothecaries” under a penalty of £20; and the
courts have held that to practise as an apothecary is to judge of
internal disease by symptoms, and to supply medicine to cure that
disease. The chemists and druggists who had largely succeeded to the
old business of the apothecaries opposed this provision, and the
apothecaries, to buy off their opposition, offered to insert a clause
in their Act which would allow all persons who should at that time
or thereafter carry on that business to do so “as fully and amply to
all intents and purposes as they might have done in case this Act had
not been made.” The chemists were not content with this provision,
and drafted another which defined their business as consisting in the
“buying, preparing, compounding, dispensing and vending drugs, and
medicinal compounds, wholesale and retail.” The apothecaries accepted
this alteration, and subsequently obtained penalties from chemists who
had prescribed remedies for customers. Such prescribing would have
been legal if the druggists had accepted the provision proposed by
the apothecaries; but they had limited themselves out of it. In the
actions which the Society of Apothecaries have brought against chemists
the apothecaries have often reproduced with scrupulous fidelity the
arguments used against themselves by the physicians in Rose’s case.
The Dispensaries established by the physicians were not long
maintained, but apparently they provided the material of the modern
chemist and druggist. “We have reason to believe,” writes Jacob Bell in
his Historical Sketch of the Progress of Pharmacy in Great Britain,
“that the Assistants employed and instructed by the Physicians at these
institutions became dispensing chemists on their own account; and that
some of the apothecaries who found their craft in danger followed the
example, from which source we may date the origin of the chemists and
druggists.”
In the course of the eighteenth century chemists and druggists had to a
large extent replaced apothecaries as keepers of shops where medicines
were sold and dispensed, and even when the businesses were owned by
apothecaries, they usually styled themselves chemists and druggists.
In the year 1841 an attempt was made to get a Bill through Parliament
which would have made it penal to recommend any medicine for the sake
of gain. The Bill was introduced by a Mr. Hawes, and the chemists
and druggists of London opposed it with such vigour that it was
ultimately withdrawn. In order to be prepared against future attacks
the victorious chemists and druggists then formed the Pharmaceutical
Society of Great Britain, which was incorporated by Royal Charter in
1842. An Act protecting the title of pharmaceutical chemist was passed
in 1852, and in 1868 another Act, requiring all future chemists and
druggists to pass examinations and be registered, and restricting to
them the sale of poisons, became law.