He will gain and keep to himself Patients, who have diseases they are unwilling should be known by Apothecaries and their Boys, and all such as have a mind to turn over their File.

The Patient will have better opinion of the Medicines, and confidence in the use or them, and the Physician more satisfied in his Conscience, and better assured of the success.

He will gain reputation to his Art, by restoring it to its first institution and practice, by the Founders and Heroes of Physic.

By constantly practised Medicines he will find out a better method of Cure, and may hereby arrive at the true causes of diseases.

He will observe what Medicines by precipitation or other ways, alter, destroy, or weaken one another, whereby of good ingredients singly used, a bad Composition may be made, and therefore fail in the success expected.  Many more things might be here added, which a skillful observer, and versed in the way to make experiments (no easie matter) will daily find, and at present I do not so much as give hints of them, but shall hereafter, as occasion and opportunity require.

He will have more scope to be charitable to the poor, and more civil and obliging to his friends, by curing them gratis, or at small charges.

He need not trouble himself with ways of concealing the use of his Medicines, by setting down no directions in his Bill, but giving them to the Patient, which the Apothecary soon learns; nor with giving some of his own Medicines at a pinch, which if they succeed not, to be sure the Apothecaries will cry down in all places, but will conceal all eminently good successes, as disadvantageous to themselves; nor by placing their Arcana’s in the Shops of those Apothecaries they commonly make use of; nor by recommending their Patients to such Apothecaries they intrust their secrets with.  For then great complaints are made that the Physicians carry away their Customers, and take away their livelyhood, affirming they are willing to fetch them from the prescribing Doctors Apothecaries.  To which I answer, that they do fetch them, but perhaps not always; since I have heard them often say, these secrets were but the Medicines of the London Dispensatory disguised under new names, to the discredit of the Physicians that prescribed them.  And I well remember some of them have neglected to fetch from my house, not far from their own, some of my preparations, though they had them gratis, for the fetching; whereby the Patients have suffered, and thought I neglected them, ’till they were rectified by another Visit.  Nay one of them told me, he had rather dy with his own Shop-Medicines, then be cured with my Magistrals:  much more would he have said of Patients, manifestly preferring his own profit before their lives; a most Unchristian saying!

One singular advantage such a Physician will have, that the slanders of the Apothecaries will appear to be malicious, as being raised against such as act contrary to their profit.