A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries

Christopher Merret

Your physician prescribed one thing. Your apothecary sold you another, at four times the price, and nobody checked. Merret, a founding fellow of the Royal Society, had watched London's medicine counter long enough, and in this furious short pamphlet he names every trick: the substitutions, the stale drugs, the padded bills. It is consumer protection written 350 years early, with a scientist's precision and a satirist's temper. Read it in an evening and never look at a prescription the same way.