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,