hecary tribe is wholly blind;
From files a random recipe they take,
And many deaths from one prescription make.
Garth, generous as his muse, prescribes and gives;
The shopman sells, and by destruction lives."

Pope followed with a smaller but keener arrow:--

"So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art
By doctors' bills to play the doctor's part,
Bold in the practice of mistaken rules,
Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools."

The origin of the memorable affray between the College of Physicians and
the Company of Apothecaries is admirably told by Mr. Jeaffreson, in his
"Book of Doctors." The younger physicians, impatient at beholding the
increasing prosperity and influence of the apothecaries, and the older
ones indignant at seeing a class of men they had despised creeping into
their quarters, and craftily laying hold of a portion of their monopoly,
concocted a scheme to reinstate themselves in public favour. Without a
doubt, many of the physicians who countenanced this scheme gave it their
support from purely charitable motives; but it cannot be questioned
that, as a body, the dispensarians were only actuated in their
humanitarian exertions by a desire to lower the apothecaries and raise
themselves in the eyes of the world. In 1687 the physicians, at a
college meeting, voted "that all members of the college, whether
fellows, candidates, or licentiates, should give their advice gratis to
all their sick neighbouring poor, when desired, within the city of
London, or seven miles round." The poor folk carried their prescriptions
to the apothecaries, to learn that the trade charge for dispensing them
was beyond their means. The physicians asserted that the demands of the
drug-vendors were extortionate, and were not reduced to meet the
finances of the applicants, to the end that the undertakings of
benevolence might prove abortive. This was, of course, absurd. The
apothecaries knew their own interests better than to oppose a system
which at least rendered drug-consuming fashionable with the lower
orders. Perhaps they regarded the poor as their peculiar property as a
field of practice, and felt insulted at having the same humble people
for whom they had pompously prescribed, and put up boluses at twopence
apiece, now entering their shops with papers dictating what the twopenny
bolus was to be composed of. But the charge preferred against them was
groundless. Indeed, a numerous body of th