And because that from the beginning of the world to this very day good and wholesome Laws have derived their original from evil manners, the whole College of Physicians doe most humbly beseach your most sacred Majesty that as the Father of your Country, you would consult the health and welfare both of your City Subjects and would by your Royal Proclamation strictly command that for the future, No Grocer, Drugster, Apothecary, Chymist, or any other person presume to sell Arsenick, Quicksilver, Sublimate, Precipitate, Opium, Coloquintida, Scammony, Hellebore, or other Druggs either poisonous or dangerous, to poor sorry Women or poor people (which hath been too common) but only to those who are willing to give their names; that if there should be occasion they may give an account of the reason of their buying these dangerous medicines.
May it likewise please your Majesty to issue out your Royal Edict under the most severe penalties, that no Apothecary for the future shall dare to compound for the Well, or administer to the Sick any medicines, especially Vomits, Purges, Opiates, Mercurial or Antimonial remedies without the prescription of Physicians then living; which prescription they shall be bound to produce upon the command or request of the Censors of the College. He that shall act contrary, shall be punished by the Law as a publick enemy to the life of man. Dated from the College of Physicians in London the Last day of May 1632 And subscribed
Dr. Argent President
(and seventeen others)
(See Goodall’s Proceedings)
Case of Standsfield.
Edinburgh Decr 1. 1687.
We under Subscribers, James Craufurd and James Muirhead, Chirurgeons in Edinburgh, having order from Sir John Dalrymple his Majesty’s Advocate, to go to Morum and there to take up the Corps of Sir James Standsfield, and to sight and view the same exactly, and if need were, to open up the body, and to consider whether there appeared any evidence of wounds, bruises, or strangling upon the Corps, besides what might have happened by his falling or drowning in the water, &c. In obedience thereto, we caused take up the said corps in the presence of “(here follow the names)” indwellers in New Milns, and some others. Having with all possible exactness viewed the corps we observed the face a little swelled, and inclining to a dark reddish colour, some fulness of some capillarie veins in the pallet of the mouth towards the uvula, as also a large and conspicuous swelling, about three inches broad, of a dark red or blue colour, from one side of the larinx round backwards to the other side thereof; we observed the jugular veins on both sides the neck very large and distended and full of blood; there was a large swelling under and betwixt the chin and the cartilago scutiformis; there was also a little scratch below the left mandibula, which had rankled the cuticula, and made some little impression on the cutis: Having made incission from the chin down about the larinx, and cross upon the swelling of the neck, we found a greater laxness and distance (as we think) than ordinary betwixt the cartilago scutiformis and os hyoides; we found the tumour on the neck, containing bruised, like dark or blackish blood; the jugulars, when cut, bled inconsiderably especially that on the left side.
Having opened his breast we found the lungs distended to the filling up their capacities, but free of water: his stomach, liver &c. were all in good condition; we found no water at all; the breast, belly, privy parts, &c. were all well coloured, there was no swelling in his belly, nor any thing by ordinary to be seen on his head. This we attest and subscribe with our hands.
James Craufurd