Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [62]
The trouble was that this conflicted with the reality of pharmaceutical production. The image was that an individual apothecary cleaved to an individual physician's receipts. The reality was that a system of exchange operated, such that one apothecary made mithridate in bulk, another theriac, and so on. And "druggists" and "operators" maintained a thriving wholesale trade too, on the fringes of Europe's cities. Coxe warned that, since they were autonomous even of the apothecaries, "their skill as well as honesty is liable to be questioned"-and, unlike the apothecaries, they could not be confronted by customers. They themselves explained their cheapness by appeal to a peculiar skill or "knack." But physicians were skeptical, denying that this knack could be anything but the omission of expensive ingredients or the substitution of cheaper or superannuated ones. Once more, this was what Grew's camp had in mind when they insisted that he did not mean to "make a noise ... with a Chymical Knack." 51 In short, authenticating substances generally meant authenticating people, and when people could not be authenticated serious problems arose. That was why setting the credit of medicaments on a sound basis would demand a social revolution in medicine.
FIGURE S.I. Robert Boyle's device to detect adulterated or pirated pharmaceuticals and gems. R. Boyle, Medicinabydrostatica (London: for S. Snuth,16go), frontispiece. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.
In the event, subsequent medical history would turn on two strategies developed to deal with this. One invoked the constitution of pharmacy; the other, its communication. Physicians maintained that a reformed "Constitution of Pharmacy" was needed to deal with this problem. What they had in mind was that physicians should become direct employers of trustworthy apothecaries-much as Grew did with Tramel, in fact, and much as Atkyns would have gentlemen do with printers. This would produce what, to the eyes of an early modern gentleman, looked like a far safer domain, with the gentleman overseeing the artisan in a kind of master-servant relationship. Christopher Merrett for one claimed that apothecaries had historically originated as servants. The interest that physicians assumed drove adulteration would disappear under such a regime. The making of medicaments would cease to be a "mechanical" enterprise and become an "art."And the physicians should band together into "Societies" to create public laboratories to this end. This, Coxe averred, would not only end adulteration, but encourage the communication of new prepara- tions.52 In "all well founded Constitutions," he added, "where there is a union of interests, there will be united Counsels and Endeavours." Surely, he inferred, "they who are so tender of every mans propriety, that they account every invasion thereof, an injury done to themselves, will not deny their assistance to Physitians, whose propriety also is strangely invaded, the Usurpers now being almost ready to plead Prescription" (that is, to claim that physicians, like patentees, intruded on an existing craft). Coxe even verged on calling the apothecaries a polity incommensurable with the commonwealth- the core of the pirate concept. He likened them to "Coyners, Robbers, Cut-purses, {and} Sophisticaters ofwine."53
The apothecaries defended themselves from such assaults much as the booksellers did. Henry Stubbe warned on their behalf of a "dangerous" intrusion on arts that had been practiced for long enough to become "Pro- prieties."54 The very existence of the pharmacopoeia, they added, showed the physicians to be would-be monopolists. They neglected "greater secrets" in favor of old medicines, and deliberately withheld their own "magistral" remedies. In the heat of the revolutionary period, Noah Biggs went further still, denying the rationale for licensing and authorship