(no subject)

[timelets]

The mediation of the apothecary between spa and patient, Grew believed and this was a standard physician s view therefore created an intractable problem of credit. Grew realized that he could address that problem experimentally. By converting a social issue into a chymical one, he could also convert it into an opportunity to make a fortune.


...

The problem of adulteration was therefore inextricably bound up with contemporary medical institutions and identities. The only case in which a physician could trust to a medicine, it was said, was when he either pre- pared it himself or supervised its preparation in person.
The pugnacious physician Coxe added that London s apothecaries were so un- reliable that neither Physicians or the Diseased have reason to repose that trust in them which they challenge as their due.

When a vessel arrived at the port of Marseille laden with medicaments, its cargo could be expected to multiply threefold in weight by the time it left the city. London was no better. The hub of a pharmaceutical trade extending across the Atlantic and beyond, London furnished huge temptations to dilute, reconstitute, or downright fabricate.

As a patient or as a physician, how did you know what a medicine contained, or that it worked? How did you know that you knew? These doubts mattered for more than therapeutic reasons. Chymical physicians demanded that their new remedies be adopted, and to bolster their case they challenged Galenists to put them to the test empirically. Grew s own salt was publicly associated with this empirical challenge.

-- Piracy.