Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [58]
However, a rather delicate detail now emerged. It seemed that neither Grew's salt nor his original paper about it had ever in fact been registered at the Society. It looked as though he had disregarded the very rules he now wanted others to obey The aged Hooke stepped forward in one of his last public appearances to counter such an impression. Grew must have declined to register his claim because he had wanted to improve his work in private, he suggested. He doubtless remembered that he had done this himself many times, and that by the time of Grew's work he had had no faith in the register. Still, Peter felt the need to reemphasize that the patent was not premised on Grew's priority in discovering the substance itself; it covered a manufacturing technique. Both the Society and the College of Physicians endorsed his stance, defending their reputations by upholding Grew's. And one of the first druggists to offer it wholesale testified that in 1692 Grew had given him his first parcel of the salt. Interestingly this man recalled that he had sampled some himself before selling any-a general practice, perhaps, among druggists to guarantee their substances.25
Yet even Grew's supporters were uneasy about this revelation. His camp appealed to the Society's civility to justify his reticence; yet it now appeared that he himself had not honored that civility. Since counterfeits were prevalent and dangerous, some suggested, Grew should reveal the secret of his method to deny them their opportunity If he did reveal it, he would truly "approve himself a Genuine Member of both the Royal Societies." In other words, these supporters came close to charging him with the very monopolism that the Moults alleged. Far from the Royal Society upholding Grew's innocence, it now looked like Grew's monopolism would taint the Society.26
Grew seems not to have taken this advice, and in practice the Moults evidently won the contest. There was no trial that we know of, and no indication that they withdrew from their venture. Indeed, a couple of decades later the Royal Society itself would remember George Moult as an honored and respectable fellow. At the advent of medical patenting, then, not only did patenting itself emerge as a tactic-as a challenge to counterfeits, not something challenged by them-but the counterfeits also won out. Claims of strong authorship in medicaments did not prevail, despite the endorsements of the Royal Society and the College of Physicians. We may properly ask, therefore, why those claims endured. The answer is implicit in the degree to which authorship and counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals were bound up with the social constitution of medicine itself. Establishing a secure regime for pharmaceuticals would require a revolution in that world.
MEDICINE IN THE BALANCE
Although the notion of "patent medicines" originated in the early modern period, there is no evidence that seeking actual patents on medicaments was a normal practice. Empirics and apothecaries preferred either to maintain confidentiality about the ingredients of their medicaments or, occasionally, to make a virtue of openness and rely instead on their craft reputation for producing a given drug more reliably, safely, and affordably than their peers. Sometimes they collected secrets and swapped them in a kind of barter marketplace-we know that Boyle did this with medical receipts.27 New world imports seem to have been the first kinds of drugs for which actual monopoly rights were sought. The Fugger banking family got the most valuable of all, a monopoly on the transport of guaiac bark, in return for a loan to the Holy Roman Emperor.28 In Venice, meanwhile, one