In 1623 the Society of Apothecaries established a dispensary, for the purpose of making some of the most important medicines then used in a uniform manner, and in May, 1618, the first Pharmacopœia was published by the College of Physicians. We are told that it was so imperfect that they brought out an improved edition in December of the same year. This was published in Latin, and it was through making and publishing his translation of this work that Nicholas Culpepper (who was a man of common-sense in his time) got into disgrace with the College of Physicians, who in consequence refused him a licence to practise.
A PHYSICIAN.
From a drawing, dated 1490.
The history of the Society of Apothecaries of London is an interesting one. It is a mystery or guild which has retained its original function of a trading corporation. It arose as an offshoot of the Grocers’ Company, which descended from the pepperers and the spicers, who amalgamated in 1345 under the name of the Fraternity of St. Anthony. The Grocers’ Company is one of the most powerful and wealthy of the twelve great Livery Companies of London which have survived from mediæval times.
King James I. appears to have interested himself in the separation of the two bodies about the year 1614, and in spite of vigorous opposition by the grocers, a charter was granted on 6th December, 1617, making the apothecaries a distinct mystery, under the title of the Society of Apothecaries. This charter restrained the grocers and all other persons from keeping an apothecary’s shop in or near London, and it gave the Society a right which had been inherent in the Grocers’ Company, of paying domiciliary visits to the apothecaries’ shops to search for, to seize, and destroy bad drugs and medicines, a power at first limited to London and seven miles round, but afterwards extended throughout England and Wales. This was discontinued shortly after 1833.
The first hall or council-house of the society consisted of a house and grounds known as Cobham House, in Water Lane, Blackfriars, immediately behind what is now the Ludgate Hill Station. It was purchased in 1633, mainly through the instrumentality of Gideon Delaune, chief apothecary to Anne of Denmark, who was one of the retinue sent to attend her from Norway when she became the wife of James I. This hall was destroyed by the great fire of London in 1666, and its site lay vacant for ten years before it was rebuilt. The second hall was enlarged and improved in 1786, and it still stands.
In the reign of Queen Anne, Prince George of Denmark, who was then Lord High Admiral, applied to the society to know if they would undertake to supply the navy with drugs, as it was very badly served at that time. This the society agreed to do, and for so doing was drawn into a long series of quarrels with the College of Physicians, whose members thought it was the duty of an apothecary “to remember his office is only to be the physician’s cooke”.