recommend the Dispensarians. The Anti-Dispensarians repaid this ill
service by refusing to meet Dispensarians in consultation. Sir Thomas
Millington, the President of the College, Hans Sloane, John Woodward,
Sir Edmund King, and Sir Samuel Garth, were amongst the latter. Of
these the last named was the man who rendered the most efficient
service to his party. For a time Garth's great poem, "The Dispensary,"
covered the apothecaries and Anti-Dispensarians with ridicule. It
rapidly passed through numerous editions. To say that of all the books,
pamphlets, and broadsheets thrown out by the combatants on both sides,
it is by far the one of the greatest merit, would be scant justice,
when it might almost be said that it is the only one of them that can
now be read by a gentleman without a sense of annoyance and disgust.
There is no point of view from which the medical profession appears
in a more humiliating and contemptible light than that which the
literature of this memorable squabble presents to the student. Charges
of ignorance, dishonesty, and extortion were preferred on both sides.
And the Dispensarian physicians did not hesitate to taunt their brethren
of the opposite camp with playing corruptly into the hands of the
apothecaries--prescribing enormous and unnecessary quantities of
medicine, so that the drug-vendors might make heavy bills, and, as a
consequence, recommend in all directions such complacent superiors to be
called in. Garth's, unfair and violent though it is, nowhere offends
against decency. As a work of art it cannot be ranked high, and is now
deservedly forgotten, although it has many good lines and some
felicitous satire. Garth lived to see the apothecaries gradually
emancipate themselves from the ignominious regulations to which they
consented when their vocation was first separated from the grocery
trade. Four years after his death they obtained legal acknowledgment of
their right to dispense and sell medicines without the prescription of a
physician; and six years later the law again decided in their favour
with regard to the physicians' right of examining and condemning their
drugs. In 1721, Mr. Rose, an apothecary, on being prosecuted by the
college for prescribing as well as compounding medicines, carried the
matter into the House of Lords, and obtained a favourable decision; and
from 1727, in which year Mr. Goodwin, an apothecary, obtained in a court
of law a considerable sum for an illegal sei