Apothecaries
‘The Apothecary ought to be the Eye of the Physician, as well in the Preparation description of Remedies prescrib’d, as in the Administring thereof. It is very necessary for him not only to understand whatever written or printed Receipts shall come to his hands, but also to know the proportion and Doses of every Medicine’.[1]
Valerius Cordus, Dispensatorium; sive, Pharmacorum conficiendorum ratio. Cum Petri Coudenbergii, & Matthiae Lobelii scholiis, emendationibus, & auctariis. Accessit hac editione, praeter Guilielmi Rondeletii De theriaca tractatum, emendatiorem; & Formulas selectiorum pharmacorum, quorum post Val. Cordum usus passim receptus est, auctiores: alius Fr. Dissaldei ejusdem argumenti libellus; & novissime alia nonnulla hactenus nondum edita calci libri adjecta sunt (Leiden, 1652), frontispiece of shop.
The above image of an apothecary’s shop in mid-seventeenth-century Leiden points to one of the principal functions of early modern apothecaries: the dispensing of medicines. The depiction includes some of the staples of early modern imagery of apothecaries’ shops: the counter, the many shelves of jugs and other containers displaying the apothecaries’ wares, and the pestle and mortar on the counter. Wallis argues that apothecaries carefully used the layout of their shops to send subliminal messages to their customers: the array of materials on display reflected not only the networks of the shop owners but also emphasised order – an important approach given the contents of some of the jars![2] Apothecaries were well aware that many of their patients looked askance at some of the ingredients in early modern preparations, whether they were Galenical or chymical in nature. By emphasising order and regularity, apothecaries sought to dampen down such fears.
It is clear that certain visual elements were generic – some elements in this Dutch example are replicated in a contemporary seventeenth-century English image (visible in Mr Michael Hanna’s webpage on ‘Apothecaries in seventeenth-century Dublin’), and it is likely that they were adopted not only in England and Ireland (given the importance of the Anglo-Dutch trade), but right across Europe.[3] Michael Hanna’s investigation of apothecaries in seventeenth-century Dublin includes a fascinating exploration of the reality of just such a shop, for the remains of a seventeenth-century apothecary’s shop was discovered in Dublin in 2017. It is likely that such shops had a wide range of products for apothecaries in Ireland and Wales were part of much wider trade networks, which enabled them to source their wares.[4] As Wallis notes, the design of English jars was ‘almost identical’ to those in The Netherlands.[5]
Probate inventories of apothecaries’ shops provide us with vivid listings not only of the equipment used by apothecaries, and books read by then (including pharmacopoeias), but also of their often wide-ranging medicinal contents.[6] Some early modern authors, such as Philbert Guybert (d. 1633), even provided ‘A Catalogue of Instruments necessary to furnish an Apothecary’ as a guide.[7] In Cordus’ frontispiece we see two additional elements: through the door a garden is visible (a reference to the herbal remedies available in the shop), and, in the foreground, a monkey on a chain is eating a fruit – an allusion to the more exotic products that the apothecary could supply. Clearly we are dealing with a very stylized depiction of an apothecary’s shop for most shops were more likely to be found clustered in market towns and cities, not out in the country as this image would imply.[8] Wallis notes that the display of exotic animals (live or stuffed), was a common trope in literary representations of the period.[9] Roberts argues that the importation of drugs from Asia and South America enhanced the status of seventeenth-century apothecaries, and, certainly in England, apothecaries began to directly challenge the privileged position of physicians at that time.[10]
It is clear that early modern apothecaries were more heavily involved in the day to day practice of medicine than solely making up medicines previously prescribed by learned physicians for their patients and inevitably this led to conflict between physicians and apothecaries. Indeed, the latter group had been a thorn in the side of practising physicians for quite some time. Jacques Daléchamps (1513–88), a sixteenth-century physician based in Lyon, had sought the support of one of the most famous physicians of the sixteenth century, Jean Fernel (1497–1558), is his bid to quell the rise of apothecaries in mid-sixteenth-century Lyon. Writing sometime after 1557 and before Fernel’s death in April 1558, Dalechamps outlined a challenging situation in Lyon:
‘The drug vendors of this city have become unruly … Wherefore they are permitted, howsoever unlearned and ignorant, to open a work ship of the skill which they profess. Nor has it been established by these laws that their learning be tested, before they might be allowed to their position – which is most disgraceful to see and to say. Although having condemned good and learned physicians, they openly examine the urine of the sick; casting aside all shame, they delude those approaching with various circumlocutions of responses; poisons, the letting of blood they order; they visit and care for the six … they prepare concoctions as antidotes without calling a physician. They show to no one the things that are used in their shop, so that rancid, putrid, corrupt and useless things are brusquely dispensed … they abuse physicians, and stir up the medical profession’s great ill-will’.[11]
Daléchamps’ account points to the multi-pronged attack on the medical practising of apothecaries by physicians of the period and that it continued to be a problem is clearly seen in the cases brought against apothecaries who were deemed by physicians to be usurping their roles.
Similar contests between apothecaries and physicians were replicated across Europe.[12] Worth would have been very familiar with such debates between practitioners in both England and Ireland as he owned texts specifically devoted to exposing them. One such was by Everard Maynwaring (c. 1629–1713), who in his exploration of the medical world of mid-seventeenth-century London, provides us with the following description of ‘The practising Apothecary’:
‘Amongst the Encroachers upon the Faculty of Physick, we find the practising Apothecary usurping the Physitians Function, to which formerly he was ministerial; but has now broke that relation and become magisterial, a professor and practiser of Physick’.[13]
Maynwaring blamed physicians for this development – their out-sourcing of the production of medication had enabled the rise of apothecaries who were now not only involved in the trade of making medicines but were also advising the sick more generally. Apothecaries were be-set on all sides for they also faced competition from spice traders involved in the spice trade and more generally from grocers, who were wholesale traders of drugs, and from surgeons who provided balms for their patients.[14] They were organized by their various guilds, who sought to police who could be admitted as apothecaries. As Halikowski Smith notes, their guild organizations bestowed on them a certain social standing, placing them above some other traders, but beneath learned physicians.[15]
Nicholas Culpeper, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis; or, The London dispensatory further adorned … By Nich. Culpeper Gent. Student in physick and astrology (London, 1683), title page.
Apothecaries were keen to take the fight to physicians and none was more engaged in inter-professional combat than Nicholas Culpeper (1616–54). Culpeper, after a series of vicissitudes, had initially been apprenticed (c. 1634), to an apothecary in London named Daniel White, who practised near Temple Bar, and when White became bankrupt, Culpeper continued his apprenticeship with another apothecary, Francis Drake, who had a shop in Threadneedle Street. He subsequently worked with an apprentice of Drake’s, Samuel Leadbetter, once Leadbetter was licensed. It is clear though that in 1643 Culpeper was still unlicensed for the Society of Apothecaries warned Leadbetter against continuing to employ him and in 1644 Culpeper decided to set up his own shop in Spitalfields.[16]
Culpeper’s first attack on the system was with this work, which first appeared in 1649 under the title A Physicall Directory, or, A Translation of the London Dispensatory (London, 1649). It was an audacious action, for by translating the 1618 Phamacopoeia into English Culpeper sought to share its secrets with non-Latinate readers. Culpeper went further – he also sought to aid his non-medical readers by defining terms that might be unfamiliar to them and to give them instructions on how to make certain medicines. This was not, therefore, a straightforward battle between an apothecary and the physicians of London. As Curry rightly says, such additions ‘were meant to break the monopoly held by the apothecaries as well as that of the physicians’.[17]
The response was almost immediate because in September 1649 the royalist periodical Mercurius Pragmaticus issued a direct attack on Culpeper, using the opportunity to link his radical ideas about medical reform to his equally radical political views. It complained that Nicholas Culpeper had:
‘Commenced the several degrees of Independency, Brownisme, Anabaptisme; admitted himself of John Goodwin’s schoole (of all ungodlinesse) in Coleman Street; after that he turned Seeker, Manifestarian, and now he is arrived at the battlement of an absolute Atheist, and by two yeeres drunken labour hath Gallimawfred the apothecaries book into nonsense, mixing every receipt therein with some scruples, at least, of rebellion or atheism, besides the danger of poisoning men’s bodies. And (to supply his drunkenness and leachery with a thirty shillings reward) endeavoured to bring into obloquy the famous societies of apothecaries and chyrurgeons’.[18]
This was arrant nonsense and subsequent biographies of Culpeper, written by his supporters, sought to provide a truer picture of how Culpeper practised medicine. The life of Culpeper which was included in Worth’s copy of Culpeper’s school of physick, or, the experimental practice of the whole art … (London, 1696), provides the following revealing insight into how Culpeper practised medicine in mid-seventeenth-century London:
‘Concerning his Physical practice; in his Addresses to his Patients, he was not, as some are, so arrogant to warrant their recovery: His usual advice was to bid them trust in God, and seek to him for a Blessing. He was none of those that used to put confidence in the single testimony of the Water, which as he used to say, Drawn from the Urine, is as brittle as the Urinal; the Water running sometimes in such post haste through the sick Man’s Body, that there is no account to be given of it, though the most judicious Person examine it; for the sick Man may be in the state of Death, though Life appear in the Urinal. To the poor he prescribed cheap, but wholesome Medicines; not removing, as many in our times do, the Consumption out of their Bodies into their Purses; not sending them to the East-Indies for Drugs, when they may fetch better out of their own Gardens. Those that knew him rightly affirm, that he was so Charitable to his poor Country-men, that the Money he received from the rich Persons he spread upon the Waters, laid it forth for the good of those that were in want.’[19]
The author of ‘The Life of the much admired Physician and Astrologer of our Times, Mr. Nicholas Culpeper’ made it clear that Culpeper’s critique was not solely aimed at physicians in London, but also encompassed his own profession:
‘As he was an Apothecary formerly himself, so he discerned the Errors of Apothecaries, and was therefore an Apothecary to himself and others. He used not to handsel his Experiment, letting loose as some do their mad Receipts into sick Mens Bodies, to try how well Nature can fight against them’.[20]
Culpeper rejected the charge that he was an empiric – an assessment in which his biographer naturally concurred, say that he was: ‘not like an Emperick, who being guilty neither of Greek nor Latin, of Writing well, or Spelling try English, being asked, why it was called a Hectick Fever, answered, Because of a Hecking Cough that attended the Disease’![21]
Culpeper’s London dispensatory went through several editions and it proved to be the first of many vernacular texts emanating from his pen as he sought to bring up-to-date medical knowledge to a wider public. In addition to his own works, Iamartino and Rovelli point to Culpeper’s vital role in translating texts by leading continental authorities, whose works in Latin were collected by Worth: physicians such as Lazare Rivière (1589–1655), and Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), whose respective works, Rivière’s Praxis Medica (Paris, 1640), and Sennert’s Practicae Medicinae (Wittenberg, 1628), have been described as the two ‘reference textbooks of seventeenth-century practical medicine’.[22] These were not the only continental authors whose works Culpeper sought to popularise – he also translated Johann Vesling’s Syntagma Anatomicum (Frankfurt, 1641); Jean Riolan’s Encheiridion Anatomicum et Pathologium (Leiden, 1649); and Thomas Bartholin’s Anatomia (Leiden, 1641) – all texts which Worth bought in later Latin editions. Indeed, Iamartino and Rovelli argue that Culpeper played a role in no less that 8.5% of all medical books printed in the vernacular in England between 1641 and 1740![23] Poynter claims that Culpeper (probably because of the diatribes launched against him by an irate professional medical community), has often been overlooked, and that instead he should be viewed as ‘figure of outstanding importance, for he had greater influence on medical practice in England between 1650 and 1750 than either Harvey or Sydenham’.[24]
Worth owned two works by him: this text, which he inherited from his father, John Worth (1648–88), Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, whose signature is on the title page, and a compilatory volume (which included the aforementioned life), printed in 1696: Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s school of physick, or, the experimental practice of the whole art … (London, 1696). This latter work is discussed in our ‘At Home’ webpage. Worth senior owned a number of medical texts mentioned in this exhibition for, though a theologian rather than a physician, he was interested in vernacular medical texts such as these and, as a founding member of the Dublin Philosophical Society he had a keen interest in all things scientific.
Johann Zwelfer, Pharmacopoeia augustana reformata cum ejus mantissa & appendice, simul cum animadversionibus … (Dordrecht, 1672), frontispiece.
Culpeper’s critique of the prevailing medical system in early modern England had attacked both physicians and apothecaries. He was not the only one to fight an intellectual war on two fronts for the German apothecary, Johann Zwelfer (1618–68), also decided to attack two dominant medical communities in mid-seventeenth-century Germany – in his case, those who used ancient Galenic remedies outlined in the pharmacopoeia of the Collegium Medicum of Augsburg, and, on the other hand, some contemporary chymical physicians. Zwelfer had practised for sixteen years in the Rhine Palatinate before taking his medical degree at the University of Padua. In 1652 he produced two works: his Animadversiones in Pharmacopoeiam augustanam et annexam ejus mantissam, cum Dispensatorio novo Joannis Zwelfer … (Vienna, 1652), (which Worth would buy in the above 1672 Dordrecht edition); and his own alternative pharmacopeia: Pharmacopoeia regia: seu Dispensatorium novum, vera et accurata componendi ratione selectissimorum medicamentorum præscriptiones continens, cum appendice (Nuremberg, 1652). Zwelfer sought to reform the Collegium Medicum of Augsburg’s pharmacopoeia which, when it first appeared in 1564 had included over one thousand medicaments.[25] By the seventeenth century, the growth in drugs had been exponential and Zwelfer sought not only to comment on the old, but also assess the properties of newer drugs.
Worth’s Dordrecht edition of 1672 includes this rather ornate frontispiece by the Dutch painter and engraver Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708), and in it we see a personification of pharmacy, receiving ingredients making up the materia medica, which is the subject of the text. On the table on which she leans, an herbal is propped up – emphasising both the importance of herbal remedies and the role played by the written and illustrated text in the production of medicines. Above her stands Apollo, holding out his hand to Hippocrates on one hand, and, on the left side of the engraving, we see a furnace on which stands an alembic – crucial for the preparation of chymical medicines. The inclusion of Hippocrates might at first appear strange, but chymical practitioners such as Zwelfer were keen to appropriate Hippocrates in the seventeenth century.
The reference to Hippocrates might also have had another meaning for appended to the 1672 Dordrecht edition of Pharmacopoeia augustana reformata was a long invective against the Hippocrates chimicus of Otto Tachenius (d. c. 1670), which had first appeared in 1666. (Worth owned a later 1671 edition of this celebrated text). Tachenius’ career had been similar to Zwelfer’s – he too had started his career as an apothecary (in his case in Westphalia), and he too had later travelled to the University of Padua, acquiring his MD there in 1652. The first edition of Hippocrates chimicus was printed in Venice two years before Zwelfer’s death and he evidently violently disagreed with a number of Tachenius’ conclusions, especially his promotion of the viperine salt.[26] In 1667, a year before his own death, he produced a diatribe against Tachenius which was posthumously appended to his Pharmacopoeia augustana reformata in 1672 – in the edition Worth bought. Romeyn de Hooghe’s inclusion of Hippocrates might therefore work on too levels – bolstering the claims of chymical physicians that their work had been prefigured by the great ancient physician; but also as a subtle reference to Tachenius’ more obvious strategy.
If so, it might have been one of the few times when Zwelfer used subtility for he was better known for his vituperative attacks! He did not discriminate between Galenic or chymical foes, aiming his verbal missiles at the pharmacopoeia of the Collegium Medicum of Augsburg, and against his fellow chymical practitioners. He was particularly scathing as he challenged inclusion of ancient cures and suggested new ones. This naturally infuriated the medical worthies of Augsburg but Zwelfer also managed to alienate contemporary chymical authors in the process.[27]
Moyse Charas, The royal pharmacopoea, Galenical and chymical, according to the practice of the most eminent and learned physitians of France, and publish’d with their several approbations (London, 1678), Figure 1.
Like his copy of Culpeper, Worth inherited his English translation of Moyse Charas’ The royal pharmacopoea (London, 1678), from his father, who had bought it on 16 August 1684. Charas’ text had much to recommend it to both owners for he sought to provide an overarching guide for apothecaries, stating that ‘an Apothecary should find in this Pharmacopoea all things that he stands in need of’.[28] As the review of the first (French) edition of 1676 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society stated, the work was ‘very useful to all those that addict themselves to the study and practice of Physick’, and it soon became a reference work for apothecaries and physicians alike.[29] Pierre Pomet (1658–99), in his Histoire generale des drogues … (Paris, 1694), a text also collected by Worth, cited it on a number of occasions, and it was soon translated into a range of languages, including Chinese.[30] Its clear exposition and explanation of chemical symbols and processes made it useful to a wide readership. Its chief utility lay not only in the fact that the author covered both Galenic and chymical medicaments, but also, as the anonymous reviewer emphasised, that he did so based on his own extensive experience.[31] Certainly, Charas had extensive experience as an apothecary: he had begun his apprenticeship in 1636 with the apothecary Jean Deidier in Orange and had subsequently worked together with Deidier.[32] At the end of 1659 he decided to move to Paris and set up in the Rue des Boucheries at the appropriately named sign of the ‘Golden Viper’ – appropriate that is because Charas would subsequently write on the topic of vipers, a text which Worth collected.[33]
The title of the 1676 French edition of Pharmacopée royale galénique et chimique, had noted that Charas was ‘Apoticaire Ariste du Roy en son Jardin Royal des Plantes’. Charas owed his position as demonstrator in chymistry there to his connections with both Nicolas Lémery (1645–1715), and Christophe Glaser (c. 1615–c. 1672). Certainly Charas played up any ‘royal’ links in his Pharmacopée royale galénique et chimique. Preceding the text itself were a flurry of ‘approbations’ from the great and the good of Parisian medicine: Antoine Daquin (1620–96), the chief physician of Louis XIV (1638–1715); Monsieur de la Chambre, the chief physician of Queen Marie-Thérèse (1638–83), Monsieur de Renaudot, the chief physician of the king’s eldest son, Louis, Le Grand Dauphin (1661–1711), and Monsieur Esprit, the chief physician of the king’s brother, Philippe, duc d’Orléans (1640–1701). The support of the royal court was matched by that of the Sorbonne, who declared in enthusiastic terms on 12 July 1676 their support for the publication:
‘Pharmacopée Royale, Galenique & Chymique, composed by Moses Charras, Apothecary, Artist of the King in his Royal Garden of Plants. That the said Work may be accompted one of the most accomplish’d pieces that has appear’d upon the subject, that the discourse is polite, the method easy, that it contains all the marrow of the Ancients, and the best of what has been discover’d of later Ages; that the Author has inserted several learned Arguments, and judicious reflexions; and lastly, that he was worthy the support and care of Monsieur the King’s chief Physitian, by whose order he has undertaken it, and reform’d a great number of good Medicines. For these reasons, we by common consent have thought it convenient to be made publick, acknowledging that it will be very necessary for all those persons that give their minds to the study and exercise of Physick. In testimony whereof we have sign’d these presents’.[34]
The patronage of the King’s Chief Physician, Guy-Crescent Fagon (1638–1718), was instrumental in this show of support from court and university and Fagon likewise provided a fulsome approbation of his own, dated 13 July 1676:
‘Monsieur Charras in this Pharmacopoea has made so exact a Collecti∣on of all that the Ancients and Moderns have afforded profitable or curious in reference to Physick, that they who shall read this, may spare themselves the pains of reading any other; and they will find without all question, considering the labour of compiling, the method and neatness of the Work, that it answers to the Grandeur of the Title, and the Reputation of the Author’.[35]
These approbations point to the fact that Charas, a learned apothecary, was accepted by Parisian physicians. The royal pharmacopoeia thus represents the accommodation reached in seventeenth-century France between scholarly apothecaries such as Charas, and the medical élite. Indeed Charas would later receive his MD (in 1681), thus officially joining the professional fold.[36]
Two things are striking about Worth’s collection of works by apothecaries: the first is that two of the above works were inherited from his father, rather than bought by himself. The second is that two of the authors mentioned here (Zwelfer and Charas), may have begun their careers as apothecaries, but they ended them as noted physicians. Charas was not, perhaps, a typical apothecary: as Bonnemain notes, he was ‘a learned apothecary … an excellent naturalist, specialised in the study of the viper; curious in botany and mineralogy; and finally an eminent physician’.[37] Nor, indeed was Zwelfer. In essence, Worth, as a physician, paid far more attention to the works emanating from the European community of physicians than he did to apothecaries, even such illustrious ones as Moyse Charas.
Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.
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[1] Charas, Moyse, The royal pharmacopoea, Galenical and chymical, according to the practice of the most eminent and learned physitians of France, and publish’d with their several approbations (London, 1678), pp 49–50.
[2] On this see Wallis, Patrick, ‘Consumption, retailing, and medicine in early-modern London’, Economic History Review, 61, no. 1 (2008), 26–53. On apothecary shops as retail environments see also Withey, Alun, ‘“Persons that live remote from London”: Apothecaries and the medical marketplace in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Wales’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 85, no. 2 (2011), 232–6.
[3] Wallis, ‘Consumption, retailing, and medicine in early-modern London’, 28.
[4] On Welsh examples see Withey, ‘Persons that live remote from London’, 222–47.
[5] Wallis, ‘Consumption, retailing, and medicine in early-modern London’, 38.
[6] See, for example, the contents of Raphe Walley’s shop in seventeenth-century Nantwich, Cheshire, explored in Cooke, Helen, Fabio Parmeggiani, and Nicholas L. Wood, ‘Analysis of a seventeenth-century English apothecary’s private inventory’, Pharmaceutical Historian, 53, no. 2 (2023), 51–7.
[7] Guybert, Philbert, The charitable physician … (London, 1639), cited in Halikowski Smith, S., ‘“The Physician’s Hand”: Trends in the evolution of the apothecary and his art across Europe, 1500–1700’, Nuncius: Journal of the History of Science, 24, no. 1 (2009), 49. Worth did not possess a copy of Guybert’s text.
[8] Withey, ‘Persons that live remote from London’, 228. Halikowski Smith concurs, pointing to clusters of apothecary shops in towns: ‘The Physician’s Hand’, 48.
[9] Wallis, ‘Consumption, retailing, and medicine in early-modern London’, 40.
[10] Roberts, R.S., ‘The personnel and practice of medicine in Tudor and Stuart England, Part II, London’, Medical History, 6 (1962), 227. On the use of American drugs in early modern London see Maydom, Katrina Elizabeth, ‘James Petiver’s apothecary practice and the consumption of American drugs in early modern London’, Notes and Records, 74 (2020), 213–38.
[11] Bono, James J., and Charles B. Schmitt, ‘An unknown letter of Jacques Daléchamps to Jean Fernel: local autonomy versus centralized government’, Bulleting of the History of Medicine, 53, no. 1 (1979), 125–6.
[12] On the growing identity among apothecaries in sixteenth-century England see Pelling, Margaret and Charles Webster, ‘Medical practitioners’, in Webster, Charles (ed.), Health, medicine and mortality in the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1979), pp 177–9.
[13] Maynwaring, Everard, Medicus absolutus … The compleat physitian, qualified and dignified. The rise and progress of physick, historically, chronologically, and philosophically illustrated. Physitians … charactered and distinguished. The abuse of medicines … and illegal practisers detected. Cautioning the diseased … and informing them in the choice of a good physitian (London, 1668), p. 31.
[14] Halikowski Smith, ‘The Physician’s Hand’, 37.
[15] Ibid., 47.
[16] Curry, Patrick, ‘Culpeper, Nicholas, (1616–1654), physician and astrologer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB).
[17] Ibid.
[18] Cited in Poynter, F.N.L., ‘Nicholas Culpeper and his books’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 17, no. 1 (1962), 159.
[19] Culpeper, Nicholas, Culpeper’s school of physick, or, the experimental practice of the whole art … (London, 1696), Sig. C5r–v.
[20] Ibid., Sig. C5v.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Rinaldi, quoted in Iamartino, Giovanni, and Giulia Rovelli, ‘A Physical Dictionary of 1655: When translating medical science is not enough’, Token: A Journal of English Linguistics, 8 (2019), 10.
[23] Iamartino and Rovelli, ‘A Physical Dictionary of 1655’, 10.
[24] Poynter, ‘Nicholas Culpeper and his books’, 153.
[25] Halikowski Smith, ‘The Physician’s Hand’, 55.
[26] Debus, Allen G., Chemistry and Medical Debate: Van Helmont to Boerhaave (Canton, 2001), p. 118.
[27] On his dispute with Tachenius see Wentrup, Curt, ‘Chemistry, Medicine, and Gold-Making: Tycho Brahe, Helwig Dieterich, Otto Tachenius, and Johann Glauber’, ChemPlusChem, 88, no. 1 (2023), 1–24. As Worth collected works by Tachenius and did not purchase a copy of Zwelfer’s own pharmacopoeia, it seems clear where his sympathies lay.
[28] Charas, The royal pharmacopoea, p. 44.
[29] Anon, ‘An account of two books: I Tractatus de ventriculo & intestinis, nec non de partibus continentibus in genere & in specie de partibus abdominis; Auth Franc Glissonio, M.D. &c. II. Pharmacopee Royale, galenique & chymique, par Moyse Charas’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 11, no. 128 (1676), 709.
[30] Bonnemain, Bruno, ‘Moyse Charas, un maître apothicaire et docteur en médecine emblématique de son époque (1619–1698)’, Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie, 391 (2016), 410–11.
[31] Anon, ‘An account of two books: I Tractatus de ventriculo & intestinis, nec non de partibus continentibus in genere & in specie de partibus abdominis; Auth Franc Glissonio, M.D. &c. II. Pharmacopee Royale, galenique & chymique, par Moyse Charas’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 11, no. 128 (1676), 710. Coste makes the point that this combination of both Galenic and Chymical remedies was a new approach: Coste, Joël, ‘Practical medicine and its literary genres in France in the early modern period’, 2008.
[32] Bonnemain, ‘Moyse Charas, un maître apothicaire et docteur en médecine emblématique de son époque (1619–1698)’, 405.
[33] Ibid., See, for example, Worth’s copy of Charas’ New experiments upon vipers: with exquisite remedies that may be drawn from them as well for the cure of their bitings, as for that of other maladies : also a tetter [sic] of Francisco Redi, concerning some objections made upon his observations about vipers written to Monsieur Bourdelot and Mr. Alex. Morus: together with the sequel of new experiments upon vipers, in a reply to a letter written by Sign. F. Redi (London, 1677).
[34] Charas, The royal pharmacopoea, Sig. A3r.
[35] Ibid., Sig. A3v.
[36] Bonnemain, ‘Moyse Charas, un maître apothicaire et docteur en médecine emblématique de son époque (1619–1698)’, 406. Matthews contradicts this, arguing that Charas did not, in fact, receive his medical degree: Matthews, Leslie G., ‘London’s immigrant apothecaries, 1600-1800’, Medical History, 18, no. 3 (1974), 266.
[37] Bonnemain, ‘Moyse Charas, un maître apothicaire et docteur en médecine emblématique de son époque (1619–1698)’, 416.