Apothecary
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the name formerly given in England and Ireland to members of an inferior branch of the medical profession. The apothecary was in England a licentiate of the Apothecaries' Society of London; in Ireland, a licentiate of the Apothecaries' Hall of Ireland. Up to a comparatively recent period, however, no inconsiderable proportion of those who practiced as apothecaries, at any rate in England, were persons practicing without any license. The licensed apothecary frequently kept a shop in which he sold drugs and made up medical prescriptions, in this respect competing with the chemist and druggist. But he was entitled to attend sick persons, and prescribe for them; and though it was the almost universal practice of apothecaries to charge their patients only for medicines supplied, they had the alternative of charging for their attendances, but could not charge for both. The term apothecary has been long in disuse. Anciently, the apothecaries were not distinguishable from the grocers (the surgeons being, in like manner, undistinguishable from the barbers); and it was not till 1617, in the 13th year of James I., that these bodies were formed into two distinct corporations. A statute of 1815 enacted that no person should practice as an apothecary, or act as an assistant to an apothecary, in any part of England or Wales, unless he had been examined by a court of examiners, and had received therefrom a certificate. An act of 1874 amended the act of 1815, and gave the Apothecaries' Society power to co-operate with other medical licensing bodies in granting licenses.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's already called the term "long in disuse" in 1921, and that trend held: the apothecary who "kept a shop" while also attending patients has no modern counterpart, his two functions now split between the general practitioner (whose trade the apothecary effectively founded) and the registered pharmacist. The Society of Apothecaries of London, chartered in 1617 as Collier's notes, survives in the City but stopped examining candidates for its medical licence, the LMSSA, at the end of the twentieth century; it now awards postgraduate diplomas in fields such as the history of medicine and forensic medicine. British pharmacy itself was recast by the Medicines Act 1968 and is regulated today by the General Pharmaceutical Council, created in 2010. The word lingers mainly as decoration on American drugstore signs and in museum reconstructions of jar-lined shops.
Written for this edition, 2026.