January, 1883. 
THE CHEMIST AND DRUGGIST. 
75 
REMINISCENCES OF A PHARMACIST. 
(By J. B. Mummery.) 
(< Continued .) 
Those i who have read these papers will not be surprised to find 
that the proprietor of the Camperdown Apothecaries’ Hall 
made himself famous in a case of poisoning. Fatal mistakes 
in dispensing have occurred from time immemorial, even by 
competent hands, and where every precaution appeared to 
have been taken to prevent them ; but when such fatalities 
are brought about by the sheer incompetency of those who 
have assumed a calling which they know nothing about, from 
greed or any other unworthy motive, they assume another 
shape than mere inadvertence, at least so thinks the writer. 
The New Shop. 
Amongst the many improvements made in the city of 
Sydney about the year 1856 was the conversion of a part of 
the old dull market wall facing George-street into a row of 
attractive shops ; and as this part of the city was about its 
best business portion, it is not to be wondered at that the 
shops let readily ; and amongst the successful applicants for 
occupancy was the gentleman who owned the establishment I 
have already described as “Apothecaries’ Hall.” The shop 
was duly opened as a chemist’s, and over the window appeared 
in gold letters the name of the quondam dealer in chamois 
bags and gold-diggers’ belts. Whether he succeeded in attract- 
ing any amount of business to his establishment or not I 
cannot say ; but I think his career was too limited for that • 
for one Saturday night, shortly after opening, a person came 
in for a given quantity of the harmless, old-fashioned mixture 
of syrup of squills and oil of almonds. Of course, any 
apprentice of a month s standing would have known the kind 
.. indicated, but J. D. did not, for he gave the essential 
oil ot bitter almonds with syrup of squills, the first dose of 
which was fatal to the child. The defence at the inquest was 
that the chemist (?) imagined that the mixture was required 
tor flavouring ; but, seeing that syrup of squills is not con- 
sidered a flavouring agent generally, it will not need a very 
imaginative person to think that J. D. (like the young man 
at Brisbane, of whose fatal mistake we have recently had an 
account) was not aware that there was any difference between 
tbe distilled oil of bitter almonds and the expressed oil of 
sweet. 
In this case, as in Doctor Degner’s, no punishment was 
awarded. The Attorney-General of the day, indeed, refused to 
me a bill ; but punishment came as a matter of course. The 
Bhop was marked as a dangerous establishment, and a week or 
two afterwards the shutters were up. 
A Sad Case. 
I now come to a case which presented peculiar features, and 
winch ended in fatal result to a personal friend of my own, 
3 Mi. Charles Goddard. This gentleman was an engraver in a 
pod way of business in Sydney, and had only been married a 
tew weeks at the time of his melancholy death, which occurred 
through a mistake of a chemist’s assistant. 
. ® le unfortunate man suffered dreadfully from hoemorrhoids. 
•or the relief of which he was in the habit of taking a decoc- 
Jon of “ Tormentilla root.” 
On leaving business one day he called at a chemist’s shop in 
king-street and requested to be supplied with a portion of the 
oot named, and which having received he carried home and 
piled in the usual way, and put aside to cool. He then sat 
lowii to partake of his tea. Just before going to rest he 
‘Wallowed the dose which was fated to cause his death, and 
iad no sooner done so than he said to his wife, “ I am poisoned 1 
am sure there must be some mistake; this is not the medicine 
vnich I usually take.” A medical man was immediately sent 
or, but before his arrival unmistakable evidence of aconite 
>oisoning had set in, and in spite of the most vigorous efforts 
ight Un ^ eraC ^ e ^ ec * s ’ P 00r Goddard never saw the morning 
This case, as may be expected, created a great commotion 
Q oydney, for the victim was not only well known, but greatly 
espected. & J 
On examining the drawer at the chemist’sfrom which the root 
ad been taken, which was labelled “Tormentilla,” it was found 
Hat all the upper portion of its contents were aconite, and it 
ame out that the mistake was caused by the senior assistant 
aving carelessly examined a parcel which had been brought to 
him by a junior from a back store, which the latter had been 
cleaning and arranging, who, having found a parcel without a 
label, or with an indistinct superscription, took it into the shop 
to his superior, and this individual, either from ignorance or 
carelessness, pronounced it “ Tormentilla,” and shot it into the 
drawer accordingly; and, by that act, signed the death-warrant 
ol the gentleman whose sad fate I have just narrated. The 
business of the shop (which had formerly been a very 
good one) fell off to such an extent as to cause the ruin of the 
proprietor, and I am not sure whether the business exists at 
all at the present day ; but if it does I expect that it will 
take generations to effectually wipe out the stain which by 
this one fatality became attached to it. 
Only a Child. 
t ° 1 ne 11 0ther case of poisoning by negligence and then, I think, 
1 shall pretty nearly have exhausted the patience of my 
readers. It occurred to the child of a next door neighbour of 
mine at Camden, a country town about forty miles from 
bydney where for some years previously to my coming to 
, e bourne I kept a chemist’s shop. The affair occurred 
shortly before I went there, and was caused by one of the 
local storekeepers. 
A child of a Mrs. H. was taken ill with some infantile ail- 
ment for which the mother deemed a dose of tincture of 
rhubarb an expedient remedy, and sent to the store for some 
accordingly (there was no chemist in the place at that time), 
administered a dose, and put the child to bed. Some time 
afterwards the anxious mother, becoming alarmed at certain 
symptoms which had developed themselves, sent in haste to 
the doctor, who at once pronounced tbe case one of opium 
poisoning, from which the poor little sufferer died, in spite of 
the most strenuous efforts on the part of the medical attendant 
to save it. The cause of the painful affair will be anticipated 
by my readers. The storekeeper had given laudanum instead 
of tincture of rhubarb— a mistake which, I think, did not 
cause him a very great amount of remorse, judging bv the 
persistent and careless way in which he dabbled in drugs and 
chemicals, even after he was relieved of the absolute necessity 
of doing so by the establishment of a chemist’s shop in the 
town. * 
(To be concluded in our next .) 
BACILLI AS ETIOLOGICAL FACTORS IN DISEASE. 
If there has been any one feature more prominent than another 
in medicine during the past two or three years more particu- 
larly, that feature has been the inquiry into the causation of 
disease. This inquiry may be said to be characterised by a 
species of materialism— that is, the search has been for de- 
monstrable germs, which, being taken into the system, give 
rise to the particular diseases ; or, in other words, the tendency 
has been to regard disease as the fruitage of certain seeds 
sown in the soil of the system. This conception is, we say 
somewhat materialistic as opposed to the somewhat vague 
hypotheses of telluric and other intangible influences, which 
have for many years dominated the professional mind. 
Our readers are doubtless familiar with the experiments 
which Pasteur, Koch, Klebs, Tommasi-Crudeli, Sternberg, 
Wood, and Formad have reported within the past year. The 
activity of investigation in this direction is clearly manifested 
by this array of names, and the expectant medical mind looks 
longingly towards the east for the appearance of the day- 
star of hope for deliverance from the uncertainty which 
has, ever since medicine started on its history, so perplexed 
the searcher into the causes of diseases. As yet, however 
although hope has been buoyant and full of lively anticipation" 
it has not had much that it can plant its foot upon, as upon 
a solid foundation . Pasteur, it is true, has discovered th efons 
et ongo mahs of the splenic fever and cholera which have been 
wont to decimate the herds and chicken coops of France ; but 
although his discoveries have raised us up to where we can 
ls °l ate bacillus which works death in the form 
o diphtheria and scarlatina, we have not yet been quite able 
to do so. When this greatest among modern savants dis- 
covered the germ of these diseases which deal death to these 
iower animals, and by cultivating them, robbed them suffici- 
ently of their virulence to permit of their inoculation into the 
well beast, which it thoroughly protected against the spon- 
taneous and fatal form of the disease, the heart of humanitv 
gave an exultant throb. Was it too much to hope from these 
