PRESCRIPTIONS. 
2 
difficulties both of prescribes and dispensers become most apparent. The 
physician naturally appeals to the pharmaceutist for assistance in devising new 
methods of combining or preparing remedies to be submitted to trial, and these, 
of course, in the first instance, may be unknown, excepting to those by whom 
they have been introduced. The prescription cannot always indicate the pre¬ 
cise nature of the remedies ordered without referring to some authority for de¬ 
tailed descriptions, which could not be conveniently included in so brief a 
document as it necessarily is. If the reference be to some Pharmacopoeia other 
than that which is legally recognized, or to some remedy of which an account 
has already been published, this should be clearly indicated in the prescription. 
But the remedy may be one of which no published account exists. Is the phy¬ 
sician to be precluded from ordering such ? It may be a remedy with reference 
to which even those who are using it are not yet satisfied that they have per¬ 
fected the method of producing it, and this would be sufficient ground for ob¬ 
jecting to its publication. But there are other obvious motives which are 
likely to come into operation in such cases. The chemist who has assisted in 
suggesting or preparing the remedy, and who may have spent much time and 
have otherwise incurred expense in experimenting on the subject, not unnatu¬ 
rally looks for some benefit in return, and therefore expects to be allowed ex¬ 
clusively to supply the remedy to others. There is nothing very unreasonable 
in this; but the question arises as to the best method of satisfying just claims 
of this description without injury to others, and without prejudice to the in¬ 
terests of the profession which may be implicated in such cases. 
If the remedy be a new and unknown one, the name by which it is 
prescribed, and by which alone it can be designated in a prescription, may 
fail, as it probably would, to indicate its exact composition, or to supply suf¬ 
ficient information to enable those not otherwise instructed to prepare it. The 
true method of preparing it is known only to the chemist by whom the 
process was worked out experimentally. It may be a liquor or a syrup or a 
tincture, containing some very active ingredients,—strychnia or morphia, hy¬ 
drocyanic acid or arsenic,—but the name gives no indication of the strength of 
the preparation ; and if it be prescribed without further reference, much annoy¬ 
ance, if not serious injury, may result. A chemist has a prescription brought 
to him by a regular customer, in which a medicine such as we have alluded to is 
ordered. Is he to make up something that will answer to the name and not be 
inconsistent with the dose ordered? or shall he tell the patient that he has not 
the required information to enable him to prepare the medicine ? or shall he 
refer to the physician for further information ? The last-named course, which 
would be that usually adopted when practicable, may, in some instances, be im¬ 
practicable, in which case the chemist may suffer in reputation, or lose his cus¬ 
tomer, or be tempted to prepare the medicine without sufficiently precise know¬ 
ledge of the method of doing so. It is much to be desired that some more 
systematic and unobjectionable method than is now frequently pursued should 
be agreed upon and generally adopted in cases such as these. The prescription 
should, in every instance, give sufficient information, directly or by reference, 
to enable any qualified pharmaceutist to dispense it. If the names used be such 
as occur in the legally authorized Pharmacopoeia, they should, of course, be in¬ 
terpreted according to that authority ; if they are intended to refer to any other 
published authority, this should be clearly indicated in the prescription ; and 
lastly, if a medicine is ordered, of which there is no published account, and only 
one authorized maker, the name of the maker should be appended, so that the 
medicine might be obtained from him when required for dispensing. By some 
such arrangement as this, the interests of all the parties concerned would be pro¬ 
tected more completely than they were at present, and dispensing chemists would 
be spared the annoyance frequently experienced from the use of terms in pre¬ 
scriptions, the full signification of which is intelligible only to a favoured few. 
