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By Root 1971 0

the patent was a response-a tactic, and a desperate one at that. And it did Grew little good. The delay in getting it meant that, as far as the Moults were concerned, he was attempting to use royal power to suppress a craft already in being- that old complaint, explicitly proscribed by the Monopolies Act and earlier leveled by the booksellers against Atkyns. They redoubled their defiance. The lord chancellor found their advertisements "Sawcy," and the secretary of state stepped in to suppress them. But the despairing Grew was at the end of his tether. He entered into desultory peace negotiations, even offering to hand over his patent "for Peace sake, and the better suppressing of Counterfeits." They refused, and promptly seized the opportunity to give out that they were now making their salt "by Dr. Grew's Direction."18 At this point Grew gave up. He threw up his hands, signed over the patent to the resolute Peter, and retreated to his study.

TRUTH AND MALICIOUS FALSEHOOD

What Peter produced as his last bid to stop these medicinal counterfeiters is a book that is now utterly forgotten, but which deserves a place among the canonical texts in the history of what we now call intellectual property. It went by the title Truth in opposition to ignorant and malicious falshood. The work offered one of the first public rationales for patenting inventions in general, and the first for pharmaceutical patenting in particular. It did so by underlining fears of counterfeiting, and by arguing that only with security of identity could an international trade in medicaments be established.19

For Peter, pharmaceutical patents were justified and necessary for four principal reasons. First, he maintained that pharmacy in general, and Grew's work in particular, did indeed produce genuinely new inventions. To claim that, however, he found himself defending the proposition that it was possible in principle for any invention to be truly new. The telescope, for example, radical though it had been in Galileo's hands, used knowledge and materials familiar from spectacles. Peter conceded that virtually all inventions were "grounded upon some precedent Invention." Yet he insisted that in some cases the new device gave rise to whole new fields of knowledge or endeavor, and in such cases one could indeed speak of real creation. He cited as an example a proposition in Euclid's Elements that had become the basis for land surveying; this proposition had certainly rested on its predecessors, but that hardly invalidated its status as an invention with respect to the new discipline. Similarly, microscopes and telescopes had revealed a new world. And Walcot's desalination machine had essentially been a distilling engine, based on a technique introduced half a millennium earlier; because nobody had thought to apply it to seawater for such public use, Parliament had seen fit to "define, what is a new Invention." The new world it addressed was that of commercial empires. The 1624 Statute of Monopolies itself had exempted a patent in the long-practiced craft of glassmaking in order to help launch an export industry. And Peter accounted Grew's a stronger case than any of these. A few physicians might have performed isolated experiments on spawaters, but none had set up a manufacturing plant to make quantities of the stuff. That was what made Grew's an invention.20

Second, the salt produced under the patent was of public benefit. It was purer and safer than even the spa water itself Its consistent, reliable nature made it preferable. By contrast, the counterfeit salt produced real public harm. Fourteen eminent London physicians had signed a statement for him that, "coming into the Hands of Quacks, Women, and all sorts of Ignorant and Adventurous People," it would surely hurt patients -a statement that possibly reflected their attitude toward unlicensed medical practitioners more than their expertise in the salt. Still, Peter cited evidence that it had caused harm, although it is difficult now to assess this testimony. His examples came from Ireland, where physicians