THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL. 
SECOND SERIES. 
YOL. X.—No. II.—AUGUST, 1868 . 
THE SALE OE POISONS AND EXTENSION OE PHARMACY 
ACT. 
The Pharmacy Bill, which has now passed both Houses of Parliament, has 
attracted a considerable amount of attention. As to real opponents in either house, 
it is, perhaps, scarcely too much to say that none have appeared. On the one hand, 
no peer or member of the House of Commons has attempted to deny that the 
sale and dispensing of poisonss hould be entrusted only to men educated specially 
to fit them for such an avocation; while, on the other, no one has been prevailed 
on to take up the cry of alarm raised by a certain grade of the medical profes¬ 
sion, lest the chemists who are to be examined and certified as to their trust¬ 
worthiness to compound poisons should assume to themselves, and the public 
should deem them to possess as a consequence of that examination and cer¬ 
tificate, a right and ability to step beyond their legitimate calling, and tres¬ 
pass on the province of the medical practitioner. We will say no more about 
this unnecessary alarm than to deprecate, as we have ever most strongly done 
in this Journal, the unjustifiable assumption of medical practice by unquali¬ 
fied men, and to assert our firm belief that the whole tendency of the Pharma¬ 
ceutical Society has been in an opposite direction. A pharmaceutist may find 
dignity and profit enough in his own profession to satisfy his aspirations and 
wants, notwithstanding the upward tendency of society in all its classes. It 
would have been strange indeed if any man had had the temerity to propose in 
the House of Commons that, rather than a chemist should be led to regard 
himself as a doctor, he should be encouraged—nay, almost compelled—to remain 
unfitted for his own duties. Or, even going a little further, in the present age, 
when the Legislature is urged to protect the public against the baneful effect of 
ineradicable vices, to say that, seeing people are addicted to the popular indis¬ 
cretion of consulting chemists in cases of belly-ache, the wise course for a pater¬ 
nal government to pursue would be to keep those chemists in a state of igno¬ 
rance. 
Happily, Parliament does not legislate in this wise. There are enlightened 
senators sitting at Westminster who weigh possible evil against probable good ; 
and on the present occasion the possible evil has kicked the beam when poised 
against probable good thrown into a scale already loaded with evil of proved 
existence. In truth, the weight of existing evil has been so great that it has 
made some men unwisely energetic in their efforts to eradicate it; and the pro¬ 
moters of the Pharmacy Bill have had more to fear from their friends than their 
foes. The Pharmaceutical Society had many things to consider in framing 
their Bill, so to give each interest place that none should be lost sight of nor 
sacrificed, and yet that the ultimate object of legislation should be attained. 
VOL. x. E 
