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THE ALUMNI JOURNAL. 



MEDICINE AND PHARMACY.* 



By Prof. Crum Brown. 



There is not in modern English any one 

 word to indicate a member of the medical 

 profession. It was not always so. There 

 is an excellent old English word — 

 "leech" — which at one time correspond- 

 ed exactly with the French "medecin" 

 or the German "Arzt." Applied at first 

 no doubt in a sort of joke to a humble 

 assistant it had come to be practically re- 

 stricted to its secondary meaning, so that 

 it sounds both familiar and contemptuous 

 for any one now to call a medical man a 

 "leech." Possibly the loss of the com- 

 mon name in English had some relation 

 to the loss, more marked in England than 

 anywhere else, of the sense of a common 

 jirofession. Hood has told us that — 



' 'In many a little country place 

 It is a very common case 



To have but one residing doctor. 

 Whose practice rather seems to be 

 No practice but a rule of three. 



Physician, surgeon, drugdecocter." 



To him and no doubt to most English- 

 men of that time, unity of the healing art 

 depended on the small size and poverty of 

 the place where it was exercised, just as 

 he might have said that in such a small 

 out-of-the-way place the merchant sold 

 nails and hats, and soap and bacon. The 

 work of the physician and that ot the 

 surgeon seem to have been regarded as 

 distinct from each other, just as the work 

 of the tailor and the shoemaker. It is 

 possible without difficulty to draw the 

 line between the respective spheres of the 

 tailor and shoemaker, and the one arti- 

 ficer can do his work quite well, although 

 he may be wholly ignorant of the craft of 

 the other. But we cannot draw a line 

 between any two branches of the healing 

 art. No doubt fevers belong to the 

 physician and fractures to the surgeon, 

 but between such extremes there lie a 



* From the Inaugural Address to the Edinburg Royal 

 Medical Society. 



vast number of disorders which cannot 

 well be treated without both kinds of 

 knowledge and skill. "The body is one 

 and hath many members, and if one 

 member sufier, all the members suffer 

 with it." And as there is to be no schism 

 in the body so there should be no schism 

 in the profession which looks after the 

 health of the body. 



But in England something like a schism 

 in the profession has taken place. Al- 

 though it had been declared by Act of 

 Parliament, in connection with the Col- 

 lege of Physicians, that surgery was a 

 part of physic, it came to pass that the 

 College of Physicians would not admit to 

 their body a surgeon, however eminent 

 he might be in what was called pure 

 medicine, unless he resigned all connec- 

 tion with surgery. And the College of 

 Surgeons, although their charter includ- 

 ed medicines, received as members men 

 who had not, for anything the College 

 knew studied medicine or midwifery at 

 all, and examined in anatomy and sur- 

 gery only with perhaps a few ques- 

 tions on physiology and pathology. This 

 sufficiently explained Hood's "physician 

 and sttrgeon." His "drug decocter" was 

 of course the apothecary. This word, 

 literally keeper of a storehouse, early came 

 to be restricted to the seller of drugs. 

 Very naturally the seller of drugs began 

 to tell his customers what to do with them, 

 and thus gradually unsurped medical 

 duties and privileges. Pope, in his essay 

 on criticism, published in 1711, wTote. — 



"Modern 'pothecaries, taught the art 

 By doctors' bills to play the doctor's pait, 

 Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, 

 Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools." 



The position thus gradually assumed 

 was contested by physicians and surgeons, 

 but was declared legal by the House of 

 lyords in 1703, and in 1815 the Apothe- 

 caries' Society obtained by Act of Parlia- 

 ment the right of examining and licens- 



