BRITISH PHARMACEUTICAL CONFERENCE. 
120 
travel with rapidity from one end of the country to another; a prescription* 
may be dispensed to-day in Edinburgh and to-morrow in London. This, so- 
loim as a difference existed between the two Pharmacopoeias, led not only to 
much inconvenience, but paved the way to something positively dangerous. 
To this fact are we mainly indebted for the British Pharmacopoeia; and, for a 
very analogous reason, we shall eventually be compelled to do away with much 
of the discrepancy in charges. It is extremely discreditable to us that one and 
the same medicine is liable to be charged half-a-dozen prices, in as many 1 har- 
macies. A general marking of prescriptions would very often prevent this. 
In mv own business we are daily called upon to dispense medicines, previously 
had in some London West-End house. We find no price-mark, consequently 
being quite in the dark as to the previous charge, we can only go at it hap¬ 
hazard, the chances being greatly against our hitting the right figure. Well, 
the result of this is, that if our medicine is, as it ought to be and as I believe it 
is precisely the same as the great house, our charge, if below theirs, must cause 
a feeling of something akin to unfairness on the part of the London house, and 
any material difference cannot but cause reflections anything but creditable to 
the practice of Pharmacy. . „ , , ,, 
To sum up concisely, the present remuneration of pharmaceutists is wretchedly 
inadequate, and in no way represents an equivalent for the educational, intel¬ 
lectual, and other demands made upon them. This state of things is owing in 
a great measure to their own internal jealousies, and senseless rivalries, and can 
only be remedied by local and general combinations, by mutual concession and 
more liberal notions of each other, and by more social and friendly intercourse 
with each other. , . ,, , 
Nothing remains for me but to urge the leading houses, throughout the 
country, earnestly to take the matter in hand. Let them mark the charge on 
every prescription and let it be a remunerative one. . . 
Manchester and several other towns have already made an advance m this 
direction, but these isolated cases, although very good in themselves, require 
and deserve the sustained support of every pharmaceutist in the country, and 
for this reason I venture to ask the members of this Conference, individually 
and collectively to give a helping hand to so desirable an object, and thus assist 
in lifting up their profession to that status in the social scale it has a right to 
occupy, and to which its responsibilities and educational requirements fully en¬ 
title it.. 
The thanks of the meeting were accorded to Mr. Smith for his paper, and subse¬ 
quently to the other authors of papers read to the Conference. . 
Mr. Savage (Brighton) pointed out that the nomination of local secretaries ot the 
Pharmaceutical Society lay with the members of each town, as voting-papers were sent 
out annually in May, and the Council were governed by the returns, made. . 
The President said he should like to say a,few words on the subject of prices, which 
was constantly coming up, and was a growing grievance and source of difficulty to them 
all in numerous ways. It seemed to him that they were not right to allow patients for 
whom they dispensed to regard the charge made as being for the drugs, as, n so, tne 
natural comment was, “What tremendous prices you get for your drugs . a) 01 a 
little arsenic and water. The drug in that case did not cost an appreciable price, but 
it was not for the drug that the charge was really made. It was for the time and skill 
employed in dispensing that their remuneration was earned, it was, m fact, n/ee. 
subject of greater uniformity of prices was one deserving of consideration, although he 
was not prepared to say that he saw how to meet the difficulty of the case. 1 
another subject to which he would allude, namely, the much better feeling which had 
grown up amongst the chemists of London since the establishment of the Pharmaceu¬ 
tical Society. Now, when he had a complaint from a customer that his prices were 
higher for any article than those of another chemist, it was his practice to write a note 
