APOTHECARY’S ART

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 January 1939, Page 6

APOTHECARY’S ART

ESSENTIAL PART IN HEALTH SERVICES.

The presidential address at the Brit-

ish Pharmaceutical Society’s conference in Edinburgh made a spirited

claim for the right of pharmacy to be regarded as an essential part of health schemes on terms of equality with other interests and professions concerned (says the "Manchester Guardian"). Pharmacists have had to fight for their profession for a long time since medicine and pharmacy ceased to be one. In the fourteenth century they had begun to diverge, and Hans Sachs's “True Description of All Professions" in the sixteenth century has an illustration of a "chemist’s shop" in which have been discerned some quite modern features.

It was in the sixteenth century that in England pharmacy was almost entirely divorced from medicine as a practice. The Act of 1511 established the College of Physicians, with a monopoly of practice in London and seven miles round, and this, says Le Wall in “Four Thousand Years of Pharmacy," was aimed at the apothecaries who were encroaching on ihe physicians' province. Modification of the Act in 1542 made pharmacists "insolent and aggressive." In 150 G the apothecaries were joined with grocers in a guild, but in IGI7 they oo.cunea a separate charter, James I. agreeing that pharmacy was “a mystery." Eulleyn. physician and pharmacist, and said to have been a cousin of Anne Boleyn, left some interesting directions for pharmacists-, "The Apothecary must first serve God, foresee the end. live cleanly, and pity the poor. His place of dwelling and shop must be cleanly to please the senses withal. His garden must be at hand with plenty of herbs, seeds, and roots. . . . He is neither to increase nor diminish the physician’s prescription. He is neither to buy nor sell rotten drugs. ... He is to meddle

only in his own vocation and to remember that his office is only tn be the nhvsician’s cook."