existing, and this king's apothecary — the
first man, we believe, to whom the calling is
ascribed upon our English records — evidently
was no shopkeeper of small importance. No
doubt he practised medicine. Certainly, in
the year one thousand three hundred and
forty-five, Coursus de Gangeland, called an
apothecary of London, serving about the
person of King Edward the Third, received a
pension of sixpence a-day as a reward for his
attendance on the king during a serious
illness which he had in Scotland. Henry the
Eighth gave forty marks a-year to John
Soda, apothecary, as a medical attendant on
the Princess Mary, who was a delicate
unhealthy young woman, so that we thus have
the first indications of the position of an
English apothecary, as one whose calling for
two hundred years maintained itself, and
continued to maintain itself till a few years
after the establishment of the College of
Physicians, as that of a man who might be
engaged even by kings in practice of the
healing art. But in the third year of Queen
Mary's reign, thirty-seven years after the
establishment of the College of Physicians,
both surgeons and apothecaries were
prohibited the practising of physic. In Henry
the Eighth's time it had been settled, on the
other hand, that surgery was an especial
part of physic, and any of the company or
fellowship of physicians were allowed to
engage in it.

We remain awhile with Henry the Eighth,
whose reign is important in the history of
the medical profession in this country. In
the third year of that king there was legislation
against unskilled practitioners and
women who introduced witchcraft and sorcery,
with pretended nostrums, to the high
displeasure of God, the great disgrace of the
faculty, and the grievous damage and destruction
of the king's liege subjects. It enacted
that no person within the city of London, or
a circuit of seven miles thereof, shall take
upon himself to practise either as physician
or surgeon till he have been examined and
approved of by the Bishop of London or
Dean of St. Paul's, assisted by four physicians
or surgeons of established reputation,
according to the branch of practice designed to
be engaged in, under the penalty of five
pounds per month for non-compliance. A
similar rule was to govern the profession in
other dioceses, fellows of the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge being in all cases
excepted and provided against.

This law removed apothecaries to a lower
level; they became mixed up altogether as
mere druggists with the grocers. They had
neither obtained University degrees, nor
passed any ordeal of examination; if they
advised the sick, they did so on the faith of
the skill they picked up by observing the
prescriptions of more learned men. Seven
years after the act passed, the physicians
were established by King Henry the Eighth,
in a college—had a royal charter of incorporation,
—and in another four or five years when
it was confirmed to them, the office  of examining
candidates for admission into any branch
of the profession—for they declared surgery
a part of physic—was taken out of the hands
of the clergy and conferred, as a new privilege,
upon the College of Physicians. In
Queen Mary's reign the College of Physicians
acquired also a right of scrutiny over apothecaries'
shops. Doctor of Medicine was then
supreme; apothecary was a druggist only,
who wore a blue apron, but had few ideas
beyond his mortar, and sold not simply drugs
but also spices, snuff, tobacco, and sugar and
plums. In the time of James the First, the
apothecaries were incorporated with the
grocers under a new charter in the fourth
year of his reign. But they did not remain
for more than nine years so united.  King
James was at all times ready to make
money by the granting of new charters;
that was, indeed, one of the ways and
means familiar to the royal family of Stuart.
James the First granted fifteen incorporations,
Charles the First the same number,
Cromwell one, Charles the Second nine
or ten. The apothecaries had been formed
into one guild with the old fraternity
of grocers in the reign of Edward the Third,
and the charter several times renewed had
been confirmed by Henry the Sixth, who
granted to them the power, by skilled
persons—competent apothecaries—of searching
and condemning drugs; the same power
which was afterwards conferred upon the
College of Physicians.  To the charter-granting
Stuart his two body physicians
represented the prayer of sundry apothecaries
on behalf of their body, that they might have a
distinct incorporation as apothecaries and
this separation from the grocers was effected
in the year sixteen hundred and fifteen.
The higher class of the apothecaries had
again earned credit for their calling; their
guild was called not a Company but a Society,
and had so much of royal favour that King
James used to call them his own guild, being
moved much to favour them by his
apothecary, Gideon de Laune, whose effigy, as
that of a benefactor, is still to be seen at the
hall in Blackfriars. Gideon, says a descendant
of his, lived  piously to the age of ninety-
seven, was worth as many thousand pounds
as he lived years, and had by one wife thirty-
seven children.

Thus the apothecaries became organised,
and more able to carry on the war which for
a time it was their part in this country to
wage with the physicians. It has been already
said that in Queen Mary's reign surgeons and
apothecaries were prohibited the practising
of physic. In Charles the First's time, the
physicians found it requisite to petition for
another royal edict, that no apothecary should,
under severe penalties, compound or
administer medicines without  the prescription