A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

"17.—That he meddle only in his vocation.

"18.—That he delyte to reede Nicolaus Myrepsus, Valerius Cordus, Johannes Placaton, the Lubik, &c.

"19.—That he do remember his office is only to be ye physician's cooke.

"20.—That he use true measure and waight.

"21.—To remember his end, and the judgment of God: and thus I do commend him to God, if he be not covetous, or crafty, seeking his own lucre before other men's help, succour, and comfort."

The apothecaries to whom these excellent directions were given were only tradesmen—grocers who paid attention to the commands of physicians. They were not required to have any knowledge of the medical science, beyond what might be obtained by the perusal of two or three writers; they were not to presume to administer drugs on their own judgment and responsibility—or to perform any surgical operation, except phlebotomy, and that only for one malady. The custom was for the doctors to sell their most valuable remedies as nostrums, keeping their composition a secret to themselves, and themselves taking the price paid for them by the sick. The commoner drugs were vended to patients by the drug-merchants (who invariably dealt in groceries for culinary use, as well as in medicinal simples), acting under the directions of the learned graduates of the Faculty.

In the fourth year of James I., a charter was obtained, that "Willed, ordained, and granted, that all and singular the Freemen of the Mystery of Grocers and Apothecaries of the City of London ... should and might be ... one body corporate and politique, in deed, fact, and name, by the name of Warden and Commonalty of the Mystery of Grocers of the City of London." But in the thirteenth year of the same king, the apothecaries and grocers were disunited. At the advice of Theodore de Mayerne and Henry Atkins, doctors in physick, another charter was granted, constituting drug-venders a distinct company. Amongst the apothecaries mentioned in this charter are the names of the most respectable families of the country. Gideon de Laune, one of this first batch of apothecaries, amassed a very large fortune in his vocation, and founded a family at Sharsted, in Kent, from which several persons of distinction draw part of their origin; and not a few of De Laune's brethren were equally lucky.

At their first foundation as a company the apothecaries were put completely under control of the College of Physicians, who were endowed with dangerous powers of inspecting their wares and punishing their malpractices. But before a generation had passed away, the apothecaries had gained such a firm footing in society that the more prosperous of them could afford to laugh at the censures of the College; and before the close of a century they were fawned upon by young physicians, and were in a position to quarrel with the old.

The doctors of that day knew so little that the apothecaries found it easy to know as much. A knowledge of the herbals, an acquaintance with the ingredients and doses of a hundred empirical compounds and systems of maltreating eruptive fevers, gout, and consumption, constituted all the medical learning of such men as Mayerne or Gibbons. To pick up that amount of information was no hard task for an ambitious apothecary.

Soon the leading apothecaries began to prescribe on their own responsibility, without the countenance of a member of the College. If they were threatened with censure or other punishment by a regular physician, they retorted by discontinuing to call him in to consultations. Jealousies soon sprang up. Starving graduates, with the diplomas of Oxford and Cambridge and the certificates of the College in their pockets, were embittered by having to trudge the pavements of London, and see the mean medicine-mixers (who had scarce scholarship enough to construe a Latin bill) dashing by in their carriages. Ere long the heartburnings broke out in a paper warfare, as rancorous and disreputable as any squabble embalmed in literature. The scholars called the rich tradesmen thieves, swindlers, and unlettered blockheads. The rich tradesmen taunted the scholars with discontent, falsehood, and ignorance of everything except Latin and Greek.