i64 THE JOURNAL OF PHARMACOIvOGY. 



R. Menace to Pharmaceutical Education. 



Evidences of a human willingness to profit by the supposed wants of 

 drug clerks are becoming very abundant in the advertising pages of drug 

 journals the last year or two. Reference is made to various " institutes," 

 " courses," etc., offering to teach enough about pharmacy to enable the 

 student to "pass the Board" in various lengths of time, say from six 

 weeks to as many months. 



To pass the Board ! That is all that is necessary ! Fill up with quiz 

 compend wisdom ; saturate yourself with chemical terms that mean noth- 

 ing to you ; load your memory with chemical formulas that mean still 

 less ; memorize, parrot-like, a number of stock definitions ; be able to 

 rattle off, without moving an eyelash, the specific gravities, etc., of the 

 official iron preparations ; and, behold ! you are declared by the head 

 crammer to be able to pass the Board ! 



To pass the Board ! That is all there is, then, of pharmaceutical knowl- 

 edge. Then a long surcease from care and study. A delightful period of 

 forgetting all this six- weeks' wisdom. Only to pass the Board, in the first 

 place — that is all. But why pass the Board ? The law requires it. So, 

 it seems, the mission of these various cramming institutions is not to en- 

 large their students' knowledge of pharmacy — it is merely to inflate them 

 with a semblance of it, so that when the Board applies its measurements, 

 their dimensions may be just a fraction too large to allow them to be re- 

 jected, according to the 67 (or whatever it may be) per cent, requirement. 



The evil influence of such practices can hardly be over-rated. Since 

 time immemorial a little learning has been accounted a dangerous thing, 

 and in pharmacy — a calling that has much to do with human life — the 

 rule would seem to apply with special significance. The worst feature 

 about these institutions is not that they teach so little, which, indeed, is a 

 grave enough charge to bring against them, but that they teach that little 

 so badly that it serves no purpose of practical value. To be sure, it may 

 enable the student to pass the Board, if he can get to the examination be- 

 fore his balloon bursts, but after that — what ? Simply that he has accum- 

 ulated an assortment of odds and ends of pharmaceutical lore, stray facts 

 and not- facts, all jumbled together, an endless hodge-podge, which will 

 be forgotten for the most part as soon as it was acquired. Inconsequen- 

 tial, not based on the underlying principles that both explain various phe- 

 nomena and fix them in the memory, is it any wonder that such " knowl- 

 edge " is looked on as a dangerous thing? 



But how does this constitute a menace to pharmaceutical education ? 

 First by creating and nurturing the vicious idea that the only thing a 

 pharmacist need study for is to pass the Board. Instead of encouraging 

 the young pharmacist to study for the purpose of acquiring knowledge 



