NOTICES TO CORRESPONDENTS. 
615 
patent medicines has greatly increased in these districts; the people, having more dif¬ 
ficulty in obtaining opiates for coughs, etc., are driven to purchase sedatives, sold as 
patent medicines. I believe the Act is unnecessarily severe and penal. I am not sur¬ 
prised to see your remark, that mauy have applied to be registered who are not qualified, 
and some may have obtained the certificate who can have no pretensions to qualification. 
Is this to be wondered at ? These men would have no idea of fraud; they would not be 
aspiring to dabble in a dangerous profession, beyond their knowledge. They would be 
attempting to hold what they considered their own,—to carry on the trade which they 
and their fathers had done. But these, you say, can be purged out by local secretaries. 
I confess, after the drastic purge which this unfortunate class have had to submit to, I 
should rather like to see restoratives offered ; I would rather see some of these old traders 
replaced. We may go on purging too far ; the great qualities required in the drug 
trade are carefulness, personal attention, intelligence, and common sense; the purging 
system hinted at, if not carefully watched, will afford opportunity for petty jealous 
minds to harass those who may be superior to themselves, through taking advantage of 
some portion of the hasty Act of Parliament under consideration. Upon the whole, the 
Bill is a great step in the right direction, but too precipitate, too penal, and too regard¬ 
less of established interests.—Yours, etc., “ A Lincolnshire Fen Druggist.” 
Pharmaceutical Ethics from a Practical Point of View. —To the Editors of the Phar¬ 
maceutical Journal.—Gentlemen, I cannot help feeling that some of my West-End 
brethren and a fortunate few, living in favoured and fashionable localities , when writing 
on the “yclept Pharmaceutical Ethics,” do so from a point of view that is rather special 
than general, and that their ideas, charming though they may be, can only be con¬ 
sidered as the “ideal poetry” of Pharmacy, and not its real life ; the standpoint they 
take is doubtless a most desirable one, but, from circumstances beyond their control, 
thoroughly impracticable, except in very few cases. They hold that a chemist’s legiti¬ 
mate calling is the dispensing physicians’ prescriptions and the selling of drugs and 
chemicals only (of course not excluding the higher branch of scientific chemistry-ana¬ 
lysis, etc.), and that the hair-wash, cosmetique, tooth and nail-brush, sponge and toilette 
article department are alike derogatory and degrading to the position and status of the 
trade. Now, to state this is one thing, to act on it quite another, and I cannot help 
thinking it an ungenerous castigation to a very large and respectable body of the trade. 
How many men are there in all England that would contemplate with serene satisfac¬ 
tion their annual returns , as realized by the dispensing and drug sales alone, unaided by 
the “ degrading elements” ? The reason of this is extremely simple, viz. the Custom 
of the Country ! As a rule, in the provinces, in cases of sickness, they call in the 
general practitioner, and, in the majority of cases, he supplies all medicines ; and there 
are hundreds of country businesses doing good returns, from £1000 to £2000 a year, that 
would not average two new prescriptions daily, and a very great number not one daily. 
In many localities there is no such thing as a physician, at least practising as such, many 
may hold the M.D. diploma, but practise as surgeons, therefore the country chemist has 
but a poor chance of doing a dispensing trade ; he may supply the domestic materia 
medica, and feel he would like to confine himself strictly to medicine and its direct at¬ 
tributes, but inexorable experience soon tells him that to do so may be to gain the 
empty title to respectability at the expense merely of the means wherewith to maintain 
it, and that is extremely inconvenient, especially if married and a family to support. 
What a chemist does, under the circumstances, is the most natural thing in the world ; 
to coin an expression, he radiates with or by means of the infinite number of substances 
in his shop, and his knowledge and experience suggest combinations, if not absolutely 
for healing the sick, at any rate are made necessary or desirable in this age of artificial 
refinement; and I cannot help thinking that the gain is not only to the chemist, but 
that the public are also benefited through his practical training and knowledge of the 
substances dealt in. Few persons will gainsay but that at this present time the education 
of the trade is making favourable head, and that the fault is not theirs, that the surgeons 
are to a great extent the purveyors of medicines to the million; the chemists as a class, are 
fully competent and prepared to discharge that duty, as much so as our neighbours 
across the Channel, but so long as the medical men of this country elect to be their own 
dispensers, so long must the country chemist aid his returns with extractum carnis, 
