An Act of 1815 now regulates the practice of apothecaries throughout England and Wales, and no one can act as such or recover any charges for his services unless he has a certificate from the Society of Apothecaries. An apothecary is bound to make up any prescription duly signed by a licensed physician [6]. Creswell, J., considered an apothecary one “who professes to judge of internal disease by its symptoms, and applies himself to cure that disease by medicine.” And Glenn says that the practice of an apothecary may now be said to consist in attending and advising patients afflicted with diseases requiring medical (as distinguished from surgical) treatment; and prescribing, compounding and supplying medicines for their cure and relief [7]. The invention of medicine was generally attributed by the ancients to the gods, and both in Egypt and Greece female divinities were intimately connected with the healing art. Isis not only caused, but cured disease; she discovered—so it was said—many remedies and as late as Galen several compounds in the materia medica bore her name. Hygeia, the daughter of Æsculapius, was deemed |13| the goddess of health, and Juno presided at accouchments. These fables show that in the remotest antiquity woman practised medicine. The laws of Greece, at a later period, forbad women to practise; thus, also, was it in Rome. However, 300 years before Christ, Agnodice—a young Athenian—dared to attend in disguise the schools of medicine forbidden to her sex. Preserving her incognito, when her education was finished she soon acquired a lucrative practice; and eventually her case caused the law against women to be revoked. In the Middle Ages, among Mohammedans, many women were skilled in attending to the needs of their own sex; and among the Christians, nuns as well as monks ministered to bodies as well as souls diseased, practising both surgery and physic. In Italy, at Salerno, women prepared drugs and cosmetics, practised among persons of both sexes, took doctor’s degrees, wrote treatises on medical subjects, obtained the royal authority to engage in the art, and composed poems in praise of their science. At the University of Bologna, as late as 1760, Anna Morandi Manzolini filled the chair of Anatomy; her reputation was European, and her lecture-room was frequented by students of all countries—so great was her skill in delicate dissections, and so clearly did she demonstrate the wonders of the human form divine. Dr. Maria delle Donne was professor of medicine and obstetrics in the same college in 1799; and many were the lady graduates of the Universities of Padua, Pavia and Ferrara, as well as Bologna.