In 1669 Christopher Merret, a Fellow of the College of Physicians, set out the case against London’s apothecaries: adulterated and substituted drugs, overcharging, prescribing without knowledge and encroaching on the physician’s work. His remedy was for physicians to make their own medicines, a proposal at the heart of a bitter quarrel of Restoration medicine.
A lively document of seventeenth-century medical politics for historians of medicine and pharmacy. Download the free EPUB.