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By Root 1989 0

at all in this domain. He argued that the social structure of medicine needed to be overturned altogether, alongside what he saw as other relics of ancient corruption and popery. He likened the licensing system of the College to that of the Crown's press licensers, recently abolished with the Court of Star Chamber. A collegiate physician, Biggs said, bore "an imprimatur on his back," just like a printed book under the old system of publishing. As a Paracelsian, Biggs himself upheld a radical view that medicine must not remain "a kind of staple merchandize." God-given natural knowledge would never multiply if "Art and Ingenuity" remained subject to property and licensing. Indeed, physic had originated in a spirit antagonistic to authorship. Galen himself, Biggs snorted, had expropriated the doctrines of Dioscorides, "like a Plagiary and sneaking Filcher." Pliny had done the same without even understanding them. Later physicians had emulated them so successfully that "the Art of Physick hath stood a long time at a stay ... without any progresse made." And so it would remain until practitioners ceased to "deck and polish the Inventions of Forreignerc, Greeks, Barbarians, and Ethnicks" rather than seeking out their own. It seemed to chymical practitioners like Biggs as though "the inventions of our Grandfathers had ramm'd up the way of our own industry." 55 In the end, Biggs professed to fear a kind of reverse millennium. God, appalled at the "Factors or Farmers" who would "monopolize, or monarchize" medical knowledge -who, in pharmacopoeias, "put truth at the bottom of the sack, and their own inventions at the sacks mouth" -might decide to withhold further insights altogether. God might simply "withdraw his gifts."56 Already there was a devastating contrast evident between the mechanical arts, which "dayly receive advancement, and ascend by the degrees of new discoveries, neerer towards theirperfection," and medicine, which remained "cold, and dull. "57

This was a radical claim indeed: that Providence itself demanded an open field of inquiry in medicine, with the abolition of all properties whether collegiate or authorial. In practice, the range of plausible options was narrower. Physicians wanted the armory of medicaments extended, but they insisted that for this to happen the authorship of physicians both as individuals and as a profession must be protected. That meant adopting degrees of secrecy. Merrett acknowledged the paradox. Physic had improved dramatically in "these fewlast experimental years," and it was time for the pharmacopoeia to be improved. Yet only someone "well furnished with specificks" would want to launch a new edition; and without some proprietary regime, that would require that the proposer himself "expose" his own specifics "to the whole World." Without some way of securing the authors of new drugs, therefore, the pharmacopoeia would likely remain imperfect. So Merrett urged a campaign to "restore and settle those Honours ignorant men would usurp, upon the Learned Professors of this Science." The campaign he had in mind would create a counterpart regime of authorial recognition to the Royal Society's register. Until it were in place, he declared, "I see no reason why Physicians should communicate their secrets to such persons, who will make use of them, to the ruine of the Inventors."

Here physicians like Merrett and Coxe returned to Galenism and the social structure of medicine. When a physician wrote out a bill, he trusted the apothecary to make a medicine to his instructions-but to do so only once. Ideally, he would return the receipt with the medicine itself to the physician. Certainly, the apothecary ought never to "make use of it as his own when he pleaseth for his own profit, and the Inventor have no further benefit by it." This principle of an inventor's right mapped directly onto the Galenist conviction about pathologies-and therefore medicinesbeing individuated. Coxe even wanted to insist that the new chymical medicines, which were premised on a denial of that conviction, should therefore