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to questions about its recipe, he was oddly specific about the absence of ‘distilled goats’ milk’, possibly because this would reveal the origin of his recipe and open him to further charges. As well as Mr Clapham, another apothecary, Peter Watson of St John’s Street, was asked to produce copies of four prescriptions he had made up, two of which had not been written by a physician.

      The records are sketchy but suggest that, in the year Harvey served his first term as a Censor, he enthusiastically enforced, if he did not actually initiate, one of the most comprehensive crackdowns on unlicensed practitioners to date. The main target was the apothecaries, whose combination of medical experience and knowledge of medicines made them a particularly potent threat to the physicians’ monopoly. During this period, as many as one in ten of the capital’s hundred and twenty or so practising apothecaries were summoned before the Censors, to receive a reprimand if they were lucky, a heavy fine and threat of imprisonment if they were not.³³ They seemed to lurk everywhere, down every alley, on every corner, in every backroom. The Censors heard their mocking laughter at the College’s impotence echo through the streets.

      As well as threatening the health of the capital’s citizens, these insolent quacks undermined the dignity of the College, at a time when it was preparing to move from its cramped rooms in Knightrider Street to prestigious headquarters next to St Paul’s Cathedral, at Amen Corner – a fitting address for an institution that considered itself the last word in medical expertise. From their grand new premises, they decided it was time to step up their campaign by making a direct appeal to the sovereign.

      Harvey was still too junior a member of the King’s household to take on this role, so it was entrusted to a more senior royal physician, Dr Henry Atkins. In early 1614 Atkins was enlisted to whisper the College’s grievances into King James’s ear during one of their routine consultations. On 23 May 1614, the College called an emergency Comitia so that Atkins ‘might inform them what he had done on our behalf before the most serene King’. He ‘reported much’ about his discussions, but did not want to have his words recorded in the Annals, presumably because he felt it might compromise royal confidentiality. His unrecorded remarks encouraged the Fellows, Harvey among them, to draft a letter to the King, entreating James, ‘the founder of the health of the citizens’, to ‘cure this distress of ours, and deign to understand the paroxysms and symptoms of this our infirmity’. The letter reminded the King that under ‘royal edicts … the audacity of the quacks, and the wickedness of the degraded were committed to our senate for correction and punishment’. But the writ of the College was now routinely flouted. ‘They fling scorn and all things are condemned’, particularly by the apothecaries, who ‘ought to be corrected: for as we minister to the universe so they are the attendants of the physicians’.³⁴

      Their proposed remedy was to support a move to separate the apothecaries from the Grocers’ Company – the reverse of the manoeuvre used to control the surgeons. The College had little influence over the Grocers, but might have over a company of apothecaries, as long as its founding charter established the physicians’ superiority, which existing legislation only ambiguously supported. Their wish was to be granted, despite the protests of the grocers themselves and of the City authorities, who feared the new apothecaries’ company would, like the College, fall outside their influence.

      The new Society of Apothecaries was granted its charter on 6 December 1617, after a great deal of wrangling between the College, the Grocers, the City, and the royal court’s law officers. As a sop to the City, it was agreed that the Society should operate as a guild, with the same organization as other livery companies, having powers to bind apprentices to masters, and free them once they had completed their apprenticeship, and to police the practice of its trade. The doctors also agreed to observe the Society’s monopoly by refraining from making and selling medicines themselves. However, unlike the other guilds, it was not to be regulated by the City fathers. Instead, it fell under the supervision of the College, which was given powers to intervene in crucial aspects of the Society’s business: the passing of by-laws, the ‘freeing’ of apprentices when they completed their term, and the searching of shops.

      Another important provision was that apothecaries would have to make their medicines according to a standard set of recipes set out in a ‘London Antidotary’ or dispensatory, drawn up by the College: a bible of medicine.

      Bergamo in Italy and Nuremberg in Germany had long used official dispensatories that prescribed exactly how medicines were to be made by apothecaries trading within their borders. Now that the apothecaries of London were to be constituted as a separate body, the College of Physicians decided it was time, after years of discussion, to introduce one of its own.

      They did not do a very good job of it. In 1614, a group of Fellows were appointed to produce a draft. Two years later, on 14 September 1616, a meeting was called to review progress. It turned out that very little work had been done. Papers were missing, and there were complaints that the Fellows given the task ‘went away leaving the matter unfinished’.³⁵ After bouts of recrimination, another committee, with Harvey probably among its members, was set up to complete the project. A year later, it was sufficiently advanced for a draft to be handed to a delegation of apothecaries for consultation – a rare moment of cooperation between the two bodies. In January 1618, the publisher John Marriot was given permission to register the title with the Stationers’ Company, giving him an exclusive right to sell the work on the College’s behalf. Marriot would go on to publish the likes of John Donne, but at the time of his appointment by the College, he had only recently set up shop at the sign of the White Flower de Luce, in St Dunstan’s Churchyard. The College presumably hoped that commercial dependence would make such a callow operator more tractable. They were wrong.

      On 26 April 1618, a royal proclamation was circulated ordering all apothecaries, who were then in the throes of forming their Society, to buy the new book, to be published in Latin under the title Pharmacopoeia Londinensis.36 In May, the more eager and obedient queued up at the sign of the White Flower de Luce to buy copies. Some of these early copies were discovered to have a blank page where the King’s Proclamation should have been and so had to be withdrawn. The Proclamation that appeared in the amended editions was the only section of the book in English, to ensure its message was understood. The King, it announced verbosely, did ‘command all and singular Apothecaries, within this our Realm of ENGLAND or the dominions thereof, that they and every of them, immediately after the said Pharmacopoeia Londin: shall be printed and published: do not compound, or make any Medicine, or medicinal receipt, or praescription; or distil any Oil, or Waters, or other extractions … after the ways or means praescribed or directed, by any other books or Dispensatories whatsoever, but after the only manner and form that hereby is, or shall be directed, praescribed, and set down by the said book, and according to the weights and measures that are or shall be therein limited, and not otherwise &c. upon pain of our high displeasure, and to incur such penalties and punishment as may be inflicted upon Offenders herein for their contempt or neglect of this our royal commandment’.³⁷

      The book was, compared with the continental dispensatories upon which it was modelled, concise and simple. Unfortunately, its ‘manner and form’ was, according to its own authors, defective. The College claimed that Marriot had ‘hurled it into the light’ prematurely. Dr Henry Atkins, the royal physician who had first approached the King about the apothecaries and was now the College’s President, had returned from a trip to the country to find, ‘with indignation’, that the work to which he and the College had ‘devoted so much care … had crept into publicity defiled with so many faults and errors, incomplete and mutilated because of lost and cut off members’.³⁸ A meeting was hastily convened at Atkins’s house, and it was decided that the book should be withdrawn from publication and a new edition issued.

      Marriot published this ‘second endeavour’ in early 1619 (though the publication date remained 1618, to obscure the first endeavour’s existence). The fact that Marriot, rather than another publisher, was selected to do the job seems

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