78 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



As to the relative merits of the foreign and United States 

 pharmacopoeias, a critical inspection will usually award the 

 palm of superior excellence to the latter. Although more dem- 

 ocratic in its origin than the European volumes, one competent 

 European critic has declared ours to be the "'aristocrat among 

 pharmacopoeias." 



Scope and Contents of the Pharmacopoeia. — One of the sur- 

 prising things to the layman is the relatively small size of the 

 Pharmacopoeia when compared to such works on materia med- 

 ica as he may have seen in libraries and elsewhere. Our pres- 

 ent Pharmacopoeia does not run quite to 700 pages, and enu- 

 merates less than one thousand — 958 — drugs and medicinal 

 preparations, while the larger volumes known as dispensatories, 

 commonly seen in the drug stores, may aggregate as many as 

 2,000 pages and describe several times as many thousand drugs 

 and preparations. 



The reasons for this limitation in size of the United States 

 Pharmacopoeia are several : 



One reason is that, being the legal standard for the enforce- 

 ment of the food and drug laws, the Pharmacopoeia must con- 

 fine itself to such matters as are susceptible of legal proof, 

 namely, to such matters as chemical composition, chemical and 

 physical properties, etc. Since the therapeutic or curative 

 properties of drugs are, and probably always will continue to 

 be, more or less matters of opinion not susceptible of exact 

 proof, the Pharmacopoeia can not properly deal with them, 

 and consequently one may search that volume in vain for an 

 expression of therapeutic opinion or for evidence as to what a 

 drug or medicine is to be used for, except in the case of a few 

 antidotes where some indication of the use of the substance is 

 imperative. 



A second reason for the limited size of our official drug book 

 is that, being a legal standard, it must be a conservative volume* 

 and admit only such drugs as have stood the test of long experi- 

 ence. Of the hosts of new drugs and medicinal preparations 

 introduced each year, probably not one in a hundred stands 

 the test of experience and remains a permanent part of the 

 materia medica. Until a drug has successfully withstood this 

 test, it is not fit for pharmacopoeial recognition. 



