Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [55]
At that, the Moults adopted a new tactic. Accused of both literary and pharmaceutical counterfeiting, they launched into the newspaper press once again, this time to drive home a newly personal attack on Grew himself as a counterfeiter. They reached back in time to charge that he had plagiarized the renowned Italian naturalist Marcello Malpighi in his original natural historywork at the Royal Society-work on which his reputation as a naturalistlargelyrested, inwhichhis knowledge ofsalts originated, and to which he had appealed in his treatise. It seems that they picked up on old rumors that had circulated in the 1670s. Certainly, Grew had been concerned enough back then to detail painstakingly the differences between their works, and to outline a chronology so that his publishing after Malpighi became a conscious act of civility, not an effort to upstage him. The Moults ignored this and revived the old stories as if they were widely accepted. They even embellished them. Their claim now was that Grew had actually gone to Padua in person, attended the printing house, and "stole{n} it Sheet by Sheet as it came from the Press." It was a standard Stationer's story, here put to newly damaging use. Clearly, this Grew was a literary as well as pharmaceutical opportunist. And the public should infer that it was Grew's own salt that was "False and Counterfeit."
At this point, of course, a reader could have been forgiven for throwing up her hands in despair. How to decide which, if either, of the English books was authentic? Neitherwas quite the original, after all. If Grew had absconded with knowledge from Malpighi's printing house, moreover, was the original Anatotny of Plants his book? For that matter, was Malpighi's fully his' Nor could a patient be sure which was the true salt. Even the language both sides used spanned pharmaceutical and print worlds. Just as he stood accused of violating the printer's chapel, so Grew charged Moult with infiltrating his own chymical workshop and attempting to bribe artisans in a bid to "counterfeit" his creation. The language of falsification and invasion of right was the same in both fields. So was the talk of surreptitious access to workshops. It became difficult to tell whether Grew and Peter were thinking of press piracy or drugs when they condemned "counterfeits." And the state of affairs soon became even more confusing, because Bridges's text reappeared in yet another printing, anonymously produced and utterly shorn of its attacks on the Moults. The brothers had presumably seized upon it in the same way they had Grew's original tract, reprinted it, and were brazenly reusing it as advertising for their latest batch of salt. Peter ruefully noted that even physicians and apothecaries were starting to conclude that all claims to manufacture Epsom salt, "not only by Pseudo-Chymists, but by Dr. Grew's own Direction," were fraudulent.17
Only now did Grew call royal authority to his aid. He finally sought a patent-not on the salt itself, but on his technique for producing it. He got his grant, in 1698, and immediately circulated a letter to the physicians of the city denouncing Moult. It was not the first privilege on a medical device or substance, to be sure-a few earlier patents had been obtained on therapeutic beds and the like, and on the Continent certain medically useful substances like guaiac had been subjected to trade monopolies. But it does seem to have been the first on a medicine as an invention. Yet