To give prescriptions to the very poor, unaccompanied with the means of getting them dispensed, is of little use. Sir Astley Cooper used to see in the vicinity of his residence the slips of paper, marked with his pen, which it was his wont to distribute gratuitously to indigent applicants. The fact was, the poor people, finding it beyond their means to pay the druggist for dispensing them, threw them away in disgust. It was just the same in 1687. The poor folk carried their prescriptions to the apothecaries, to learn that the trade charge for dispensing them was beyond their means. The physicians asserted that the demands of the drug-venders were extortionate, and were not reduced to meet the finances of the applicants, to the end that the undertakings of benevolence might prove abortive. This was of course absurd. The apothecaries knew their own interests better than so to oppose a system which at least rendered drug-consuming fashionable with the lower orders. Perhaps they regarded the poor as their peculiar field of practice, and felt insulted at having the same humble people--for whom they had pompously prescribed and put up boluses at two-pence apiece--now entering their shops with papers dictating what the two-penny bolus was to be composed of. But the charge preferred against them was groundless. Indeed, a numerous body of the apothecaries expressly offered to sell medicines "to the poor within their respective parishes, at such rates as the committee of physicians should think reasonable." But this would not suit the game of the physicians. "A proposal was started by a committee of the College, that the College should furnish the medicines of the poor, and perfect alone that charity which the apothecaries refused to concur in; and after divers methods ineffectually tried, and much time wasted in endeavouring to bring the Apothecaries to terms of reason in relation to the poor, an instrument was subscribed by divers charitably disposed members of the College, now in number about fifty, wherein they obliged themselves to pay ten pounds apiece towards the preparing and delivering medicines at their intrinsic value." Such was the version of the affair given by the College apologists. The plan was acted upon; and a dispensary was eventually established (some nine years after the vote of 1687) in the College of Physicians, Warwick Lane, where medicines were vended to the poor at cost price.