by many, the use of them was repudiated.
This triple division of the healing art was
still acknowledged in the sixteenth century,
when there were few great physicians who
wrote books and did not write on diet and the
art of cookery. Thus the physicians were, at
first, in close alliance with the cooks.
Sometimes, indeed, the alliance was more close
than wholesome. One of the earliest
illustrations of the fact that in old times the
pharmacist, as an apothecary in the strictest
sense, was employed as an adviser of the
sick occurs in a story told by Cicero of a man
named Lucius Clodius, a travelling apothecary,
who was accustomed to set up as a
distributor of advice and medicine in the
market-places of the towns through which he
passed. This man happened to pass through
Larinum at a time when the grandmother of
Oppianicus was ill, and was employed by her
son to attend her. Now this son was an
infamous fellow, who kept a physician in his
pay to destroy by his prescriptions every one
who was supposed to be an impediment upon
his path. His mother was among those
whom he desired to poison, but she, being on
her guard, steadily refused both the attendance
and the medicine of her son's favourite.
Application was made therefore to the travelling
pharmacopolist, whom she agreed to
trust. Unhappily the apothecary was as
bad as the physician, took his bribe, and
killed his patient with the first dose he
administered.

We speak of the pharmacopolist who
practised; but it is to be understood that in
those days the physician kept his own drugs
in his house — the list of medicaments was
smaller than it is at present — and compounded
his own medicines. Galen attempts to show
that Hippocrates, father of medicine, made
up his own prescriptions; Celsus and Galen,
it is certain, both dispensed their medicines
themselves, and knew nothing of the refinements
of dignity that were to be introduced
by their successors. If Hippocrates did not
dispense his own physic, it can only be said
that he was not true to his principles; for
"a physician," he says, in one of his books,
"ought to have his shop provided with plenty
of all necessary things, as lint, rollers, splints;
let there be likewise in readiness at all times
another small cabinet of such things as may
serve for occasions of going far from home;
Let him have also all sorts of plasters, potions,
and purging medicines, so contrived that
they may keep some considerable time, and
likewise such as may be had and used while
they are fresh."

The ideal physician of Hippocrates is, in
this country, the apothecary of the present
day. Galen says that he had an apotheké in
which his drugs were kept, and where his
medicines were always made under his own
eye, or by his hand. For one moment we
pause on the word apotheké, whence apothecary
is derived. It meant among the Greeks
a place where anything is put by and
preserved,—especially, in the first instance, wine.
The Romans had no wine-cellars, but kept
their wine-jars upon upper floors, where they
believed that the contents would ripen faster.
The small floors were called fumaria, the
large ones apothecæ;. The apotheca being a
dry, airy place, became, of course, the best
possible store-room for drugs, and many
apothecas became drug-stores, with an
apothecarius in charge. It is a misfortune, then
—if it be one — attached to the name of
apothecary that it has in it association with
the shop. But, to say nothing of Podalirius
and Machaon, Cullen and William Hunter
dispensed their own medicines. So also did
Dr. Peckey, who inserted in the Postman of
the sixteenth of January, in the year seventeen
hundred, when doctors and apothecaries
were at hottest war together, this
advertisement:

At the Angel and Crown, in Basing Lane, near
Bow Lane, lives J. Peckey, a graduate in the
University of Oxford, and of many years' standing in the
College of Physicians, London; where all sick people
that come to him may have for sixpence a faithful
account of their diseases, and plain directions for diet
and other things they can prepare themselves: and
such as have occasion for medicines may have them
of him at reasonable rates, without paying anything
for advice: and he will visit any sick person in London
or the liberties thereof, in the daytime, for two
shillings and sixpence, and anywhere else within the
Bills of Mortality for five shillings.

Doctor Peckey's charges are extremely
modest, which has not been at all times the
case among those of his brotherhood. The
present practice among physicians of being
paid only by voluntary fees, seems to have
arisen out of a law passed to prevent
extortion. In Galen's time, respectable
physicians would not undertake small cases, but
they had acquired the habit of compounding
secret nostrums, which continued in full
force for generations, and was common also
in the sixteenth century, when all classical
customs were revived. Aetius complains
much, in his writings, of the immense price
asked for respectable nostrums. Nicostratus
used to ask two talents for his isotheos, or
antidote against the colic. At last Valentinian
established in Rome fourteen salaried
physicians to attend gratuitously on the poor,
and obliged, by the same law, every other
physician to accept the voluntary donation of
every other patient, when he had recovered
from his disease, without making express
charge, or taking advantage of any promises
rashly made under suffering. Here we have
not the fee system, but most probably the
ground-work of it. This mode of after-
payment remained for many centuries the
custom of the empire. A physician of the
fifteenth century, Ericus Cordus, complained
much of the reluctance of his patients to
reward him properly when they were well,
for service done to them in sickness.