London's immigrant apothecaries, 1600-1800.

Tim topics chosen by former Monckton Copeman lecturers on the relations between the City of London and Medicine have been wide and varied. The present subject is the apothecaries who came to this country and especially to London, many of them as refugees, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their place in pharmacy. Long before the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, refugees from Europe had been coming to England. Many of these were recognized as denizens by Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. While French Protestants were guaranteed a measure ofprivilege under the Edict ofNantes in 1598, these rights were whittled away under Louis XIV until their final revocation in 1685. Before that fateful year it had become impossible for non-Catholics in France to practise the liberal professions. What had been a trickle of refugees from the mid-seventeenth century became a veritable flood in the 1680s. Those who fled early brought with them money and some possessions but the later ones had to leave with almost nothing. Mr. LeFanu, a former Librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and himself of Huguenot stock, in his account of Huguenot refugee doctors in England' notes that from 1500 to 1700 there were 470 refugees from France described as "Docteurs en Medecine, Chirurgiens and Apothicaires". Many of the apothecaries are merely names, and particulars are lacking; they are entries only in the extensive Huguenot Church Registers or occasionally in the records of the Society of Apothecaries. Refugees from the Low Countries and from the Rhine Palatinate helped to swell the numbers but unless they subsequently attained distinction, and many did so, they are less well documented than the French. I have been unable to identify many of the Palatinate refugees as apothecaries. The Palatinate, on the left bank of the Rhine and north of Alsace, was ravaged by Louis XIV in the years 1687 and 1688. A plea to Queen Anne in 1709 on behalf of the distressed Protestants from the Rhine Palatinate refers to the "merciless cruelty of the Bloody French who like a torrent came upon them burning houses to the ground, razing cities like Heidelberg and Mannheim and forcing thousands into woods and caves." Queen Anne ordered a Brief to be issued to Justices of the Peace in Middlesex for the collection of funds. A charity was set up in Stoke Newington to build four houses for the refugees in what is now Palatine Street.2 Despite the royal interest and assistance from about 1500, none of the Tudor monarchs, with the exception of Queen Mary, appointed immigrant apothecaries to