numerous body of London apothecaries to accept a tariff for medicines dispensed for the poor to be fixed by the physicians themselves.
The relations of the two bodies had become, however, so strained that arrangement was no longer possible. The apothecaries had in fact obtained the upper hand. They treated many cases themselves, and calling in the physician was largely within their discretion. At this time (about 1700) the ordinary fee paid to a physician was 10s. University graduates expected more, but they too, in the majority of cases, were only too glad to take the half sovereign, and it was alleged that they would sometimes pay the apothecary who called them a percentage off this.
Such was the condition of affairs when in 1696 an influential section of the physicians, fifty-three of them, associated themselves in the establishment of Dispensaries, where medicines should be compounded and supplied to the poor at cost price. The fifty-three subscribed ten pounds each, and Dispensaries were opened at the College premises in Warwick Lane, in St. Martin's Lane, and St. Peter's Alley, Cornhill.
Needless to say, the war now waxed fiercer than ever. The physicians were divided among themselves, and the anti-dispensarians refused to meet the dispensarians in consultation. The apothecaries naturally recommended the anti-dispensarians to their patients, and consequently it was only the independent ones who could afford to maintain the struggle. Scurrilous pamphlets were written on both sides, and one long poem, Garth's Dispensary, which was less venomous than most of the literature on the subject, but which as a poem had no merits which could justify the reputation it attained, complicated the struggle from
