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THE ALUMNI JOURNAL, 



Revision — a principle which testifies to 

 the spirit of harmony existing between 

 the professions of medicine and pharm- 

 acy — that any purely medical and thera- 

 peutical matters are to be decided by the 

 medical members of the committee, even 

 though they should form a numerical 

 minority. It is therefore understood that 

 the preparation of the list of doses, and 

 the phraseology of the respective text, 

 would be left entirely to the medical 

 members. It seems certainly worth while 

 trying to ascertain whether an agree- 

 ment on doses can be arrived at among 

 the medical members of the next Com- 

 mittee of Revision. But to make the ex- 

 periment at all, it is necessary that the 

 medical members be at least authorized 

 or permitted to do so by their constitu- 

 ents. Possibly nothing may come of it 

 even then. But the writer of this paper 

 shares the opinion of many others, phy- 

 sicians as well as pharmacists, that the 

 insertion of doses in the Pharmacopoeia 

 is perfectly feasible, and will have to 

 come sooner or later. One of the first 

 questions which occurs to the prescriber 

 or dispenser of a remedy with which he 

 is not perfectly familiar is its average 

 dose. For this he will have to turn to 

 some other work of reference. Why 

 should he not find the information sought 

 in the book which is his authority for all 

 other matters concerning the more im- 

 portant remedies in use? 



It has been stated above that works on 

 materia medica and therapeutics, written 

 by any leading authority on these sub- 

 jects at the present time, would or do 

 contain many remedies approved and 

 used by the authors themselves, which 

 are not contained in the Pharmacopoeia. 

 Since the introduction of the synthetic 

 organic antipyretics, hypnotics, antisep- 

 tics and other valuable new remedies, a 

 large proportion of the teachers' text- 

 books and of the students' note-books is 



taken up by the facts and information 

 relating to these remedies; and the liter- 

 ature relating to them, as any one may 

 learn by referring to the Index Catalogue 

 of the Surgeon General's lyibrary, far ex- 

 ceeds in some instances that which treats 

 of well-known older remedies used for 

 generations in the past. At the time 

 the sixth Decennial Convention for re- 

 vising the Pharmacopoeia met, in May, 

 iS8o, only a few of these synthetic reme- 

 dies had made their appearance, and none 

 of them had become sufiBciently estab- 

 lished to find advocates for its introduct- 

 ion into the United States Pharmacopoeia. 

 With the beginning of about the year 

 1884, however, the importance of some 

 of these remedies became more and more 

 recognized, and the financial success 

 following the introduction of some of 

 them gave a new impetus to synthetic 

 research, which was in many cases again 

 rewarded by large profits. In 1890, the 

 position which some of these remedies 

 occupied was already so important that 

 strong pleas were presented to the Phar- 

 macopoeial Convention in favor of their 

 ofiBcial recognition, but the spirit of con- 

 servatism and a sense of reluctance to 

 put the stamp of approval upon articles 

 which were protected by patents, trade- 

 marks or other proprietary rights induced 

 tbe Convention to instruct the Committee 

 of Revision to refuse them admittance. 

 Since that time the number of these ar- 

 ticles has constantly increased, and will 

 still further and more rapidly increase as 

 the century approaches its end. Shall 

 we permit ourselves to be instrumental 

 in bringing about a condition of affairs 

 when the physician and pharmacist will 

 have to seek for information regarding 

 the remedies most generally used in other 

 books, outside of the Pharmacopoeia ? Is 

 it not time to inquire whether the con- 

 ditions connecting these remedies with 

 the patent and copyright laws are of 



