From this period the apothecaries became recognised medical practitioners, the Society granted medical diplomas, and a hundred years later (1815) they obtained an Act which gave them powers against other persons similar to those which the physicians thought they possessed against them. Persons not qualified by them were forbidden to “act or practise as apothecaries” under a penalty of £20; and the courts have held that to practise as an apothecary is to judge of internal disease by symptoms, and to supply medicine to cure that disease. The chemists and druggists who had largely succeeded to the old business of the apothecaries opposed this provision, and the apothecaries, to buy off their opposition, offered to insert a clause in their Act which would allow all persons who should at that time or thereafter carry on that business to do so “as fully and amply to all intents and purposes as they might have done in case this Act had not been made.” The chemists were not content with this provision, and drafted another which defined their business as consisting in the “buying, preparing, compounding, dispensing and vending drugs, and medicinal compounds, wholesale and retail.” The apothecaries accepted this alteration, and subsequently obtained penalties from chemists who had prescribed remedies for customers. Such prescribing would have been legal if the druggists had accepted the provision proposed by the apothecaries; but they had limited themselves out of it. In the actions which the Society of Apothecaries have brought against chemists the apothecaries have often reproduced with scrupulous fidelity the arguments used against themselves by the physicians in Rose’s case. The Dispensaries established by the physicians were not long maintained, but apparently they provided the material of the modern chemist and druggist. “We have reason to believe,” writes Jacob Bell in his Historical Sketch of the Progress of Pharmacy in Great Britain, “that the Assistants employed and instructed by the Physicians at these institutions became dispensing chemists on their own account; and that some of the apothecaries who found their craft in danger followed the example, from which source we may date the origin of the chemists and druggists.”