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By Root 1931 0

the salt and its use.10 It was the only Latin work that Grew-who was a prolific authorever published. It detailed his initial experiments at the Royal Society some fifteen years earlier to identify the substance, then indicated its proper use in a range of medical circumstances. This second section in particular was quite carefully composed, being specific, detailed, and extensive. It was intended explicitly to distinguish Grew from a quack or mountebank (as physicians tended to label all irregulars) who might claim some "new-invented All-heal."Yet for all its detail, Grew pointed out that he nowhere furnished "an entire Method of Cure" for any one condition. A reader could not administer the salt by simply following his examples like recipes. This was quite deliberate. The tract was intended for the use "not of youngBeginners, but experienced Physicians." Physicians would read it in a certain way: they would know how to fill in its gaps, taking it as offering words to the wise rather than a set of recipes. And in this, Grew claimed, he was living up to the ideals of both the College of Physicians and the Royal Society. His dedication to both institutions claimed as much in a carefully poised display. Neither body claimed any kind of "Monopoly," he maintained; but they did "justly claim the Custody {respectively} ofNatural Knowledg and of the Health ofMankind." 11 Grew too was affirming an ideal of custodianship, deploying silence to mark the bounds.

As with print, so with medicines: London did not lack for apothecaries prepared to issue their own proclaimed versions of a successful product. Two brothers named Francis and George Moult came forward to compete with Grew. Theywere by no means unknowns. George Moult was a fellow of the Royal Society, having first been proposed as its operator back in 1685.1' And in the background to their venture lay a tangled story of ambition and rivalry. At first, apparently, George had agreed to buy Grew's salt legitimately. But Francis had sought to steal a march on George by securing a cheaper price for himself. Grew had refused, at which point Francis decided to make his own salt by "prying into Dr. Grew's Method." He went to Acton, observed Tramel's works, and tried to bribe Tramel into breaking his agreement with Grew. When this too failed, he set up his own illicit plant in Shooter's Hill, a demimonde and semirural district southeast of Greenwich, with a retail and wholesale outlet to the east of St. Paul's in Watling Street. He was soon joined by a reconciled George. Their operation quickly ramped up. It became capable of producing enough salt to swamp the market in Ireland and Scotland as well as in England. There was evidently a distribution network for "counterfeit" salts that extended at least that far.

The Moults simply ignored any right that Grew might have as a result of his priority. Legally speaking, after all, no such right existed. But the real question soon became one of chemistry, not law or even morality How did a customer know if their rival salt was in fact the same as Grew's? For Grew himself reacted by mounting a seemingly self-contradictory argument: that the Moults not merely counterfeited his salt, but produced something that was actually different. Not only did they "invade his Right," Grew said, but in doing so they "falsif{ied} the Medicine." Indeed, in some ways Grew thought them more worrisome if their salt did not match his original, since who knew what awful side effects it might then produce? His salt would surely get the blame for them. "Counterfeit Salts," his camp said, put at risk both the propriety of medicine and its political economy-not to mention the health of patients. The contest for authorship thus became a contest for the identity of the substance. Unfortunately for Grew, though, identifying a substance was not easy for anyone to do, let alone a patient. He was left proclaiming that the true salt could be clearly distinguished from "counterfeits" by its bitter taste. That is, you had to take some. At that point, your own body became an instrument