Page:Chronicles of pharmacy (Volume 1).djvu/270

 practice. Probably it was a large one, for he evidently understood the art of advertising himself. He claims to have been the only doctor in London at the time who gave advice gratis to the poor, and his frequent comments on the cost of the pharmacopœia preparations suggest that the majority of his patients were not of the fashionable class.

Nicholas Culpepper was apprenticed to an apothecary in Great St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and at the same time a certain Marchmont Nedham was a solicitor's clerk in Jewry Street. Nedham became the most notorious journalist in England, and founded and edited in turn the Mercurius Britannicus, an anti-royalist paper, the Mercurius Pragmaticus, violently anti-Commonwealth, and the Mercurius Politicus, subsidised by Cromwell's government, and supervised by Mr. John Milton. This publication, amalgamated with the Public Intelligencer, its principal rival, has descended to us as the London Gazette. Probably Nedham and Culpepper were friends in their early days, and they may have been comrades in arms when the war broke out. But evidently they became fierce enemies later. In Mercurius Pragmaticus Nedham, pretending to review Culpepper's translation of the official Dispensatory, takes the opportunity of pouring on him a tirade of scurrilous abuse. The translation, he says, "is filthily done," which was certainly not true. This is the only piece of criticism in the article. The rest deals with the author personally. Nedham informs his readers that Culpepper was the son of a Surrey parson, "one of those who deceive men in matters belonging to their most precious souls." That meant that he was a Nonconformist. Nicholas himself, according to Nedham, had been an Independent, a Brownist, an Anabaptist, a Seeker, and