[Apothecaries' exercise by widows of apothecaries from the XVth to the XVIIIth centuries].

As far as we study the rules of the apothecaries' communities, the widow of an apothecary was allowed to keep the shop as long as she lived alone, with the help of a servitor judged to be efficient and valuable by the apothecaries' community. The first statutes appeared in the XVth century; they were more and more numerous in the XVIth and especially in the XVIIth century. The conditions of the widows' privileges remained nearly the same all over France during this period.