APOTHECARIES.

À propos to quinine, that pretty, elegant medicine, that looks like distilled diamonds, or the rill that runs between the ornamented banks of my dear Kilfane. This getting at quintessences is rather injurious to the craft and mystery of compounding. When people cease to take medicine by the pint, adieu to Messieurs les Apothicaires! This was confessed, with much naïveté, lately, by one of the profession, who left it, to undertake an extensive brewery. Being asked the motive of this change, he said, “The public will now swallow my drugs by the quart, instead of the phial.”

How many professions depend upon the ignorance of the age in which they flourish. In the middle ages, the apothecaries were general shopkeepers, and, in England, for a long time, the exclusive dealers in wine. In Italy, where so many traces of the middle ages still subsist unchanged, the apothecary is called, to this day, speziale, or spice-dealer. When we resided at Como, we purchased our tea, sugar, wax-lights, oils, and medicines, all at the same shop. Up to the time of James the First, the apothecaries of London were not a distinct body, but belonged to the Grocers’ Company. The probability is, that humanity gained little by the change; for a trade, when turned into a mystery, is but better fitted to play upon the innate gullibility of man. The hocus-pocus of pouring one bottle into another, lost nothing in the hands of persons, who assumed the right of administering, by gallons, their own compositions.

Rabelais, by-the-by, was the son of an apothecary, who was Seigneur de la Devinière. Could this feudal lord of lands have been an apothecary, in the modern sense of the word?—or was he not rather a wholesale general merchant?

The Chinese, in their dull wisdom, have a curious custom in their great towns—a substitute for our dispensaries. A stone, of many cubits high, is erected in some public place, with the names and prices of every medicine inscribed; and when the poor want physic, they apply to the treasury, and get the price of the drug required. This speaks volumes for the probity of the people. If, in Ireland, the treasury was authorized thus to advance the purchase-money of medicines to the poor, instead of their applying to the Medical-Hall, I fear their steps would more probably wander to the whisky-shop. This public pricing of drugs bespeaks also great and general ignorance among the people, who are not considered capable of purchasing the outlandish commodity. How different from the modern American, who buys not only his physic, but his theology, where and how he pleases!

In our own times, there has been a vast revolution in apothecaries. As to the mere outward man, what a difference between the formal proprietor of a Dalmahoy-wig, and a snuff-coloured or crimson suit of dittoes, an amber-headed cane, and scarlet roquelaure, (who phlebotomized our fathers, with the solemn air of his own Galen’s-head,) and the spruce, dapper incumbent of a cabriolet, who now bounds up to your knocker with a hop-step-and-a-jump! But the “march of intellect” has done much more still for the interior. Every professional man must, in these days, know something of his business; and the apothecary, whose mental stock in trade is not as much improved as his matériel, will have poor chance of employment.—The dealers in physic first began as conjurors; then figured as priests; next sunk into retailers of hard words; and finally have become almost as reasonable and intelligible mortals, as the patients to whom they administer. What will this jacobinical age come to next?