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BRITISH PHARMACEUTICAL CONFERENCE. 
fessedly more highly educated man who writes prescriptions, or the patient who care w 
lessly takes up an opium liniment, and swallows it for a black draught, without exer¬ 
cising that common sense which we may safely state is the only true preventive of 
such accidents. 
No regulations could be devised nor Act of Parliament enforced to prevent a phy¬ 
sician from making a wrong mark, which might lead to fatal results, nor prevent the 
recurrence of such facts as the following. 
A lady of our acquaintance lately took into her hand an oval , fluted , half-pint 
bottle of chloride of zinc, having thereon a large red label , and Poison , in large red 
letters , on the top of the bottle, and took a dose therefrom, instead of from a round 
pint bottle, having a small plain label , which she had used for two years for a sooth¬ 
ing syrup in daily and frequent use. 
Another lady of our acquaintance went to a cupboard wdiere medicines are kept on 
a middle shelf to procure a dose of fluid magnesia, but instead of taking the proper 
bottle standing before her face, got a chair and took a bottle of chloride of zinc from 
a distant corner of a top shelf, and, in spite of the red label and the word Poison , took 
a dose, which killed her in a week. 
Such cases can be quoted by the dozen, together with numberless little inexplicable 
instances in daily life, of temporary absence of common sense, which serve to prove 
the frailty of human nature, and how powerless are all rules and regulations must be 
to prevent their recurrence entirely. 
The case at Liverpool brings all these considerations before us in the most vivid 
manner. No men amongst my acquaintance in the profession have taken more pains 
to render their dispensing establishment a model one than the defendants; none can 
take more pains to secure good assistants than they have done; yet a calamity has 
fallen upon them in a most inexplicable manner. A customer dies from the effects 
of a dose of strychnia, supposed to have been supplied instead of James’s Powder, from 
their pharmacy. The assistant who compounded the prescription is tried for man¬ 
slaughter, and acquitted, because it was a mischance ,—a just verdict. His principals 
are sued for damages, laid at £10,000! which they were preparing to defend, when it 
was discovered the law, as laid down in “Lord Campbell’s Act,” compelled the jury 
to award damages in compensation to the friends of the deceased. Thus in the ope¬ 
ration of an unjust law, the proprietors of an old establishment, as perfect as human 
forethought could make it, and who were perfectly innocent of the death of their cus¬ 
tomer, were forced to compromise the affair by paying £1500 to the widow and 
children, and £500 or £600 for law expenses. 
Is a man to suffer destructive and ruinous spoliation because his assistant is not 
more than human ? It is monstrous injustice. Who is safe amongst us if a ruinous 
prosecution is to follow an accident, however sad and fatal it may be, which may 
any day occur to any one of us,—a class of men proverbially and necessarily careful 
for their own existence’ sake ? And who will enter a profession liable to such fatal re¬ 
sponsibility ? 
A general practitioner may, and does, make numberless mistakes with impunity, be¬ 
cause the facts are confined to himself and his own surgery. The eyes of the physi¬ 
cian and the public are not on him or his dispenser, to stimulate to vigilance and 
care; thus few accidents under such circumstances ever see the light, and perhaps it is 
well it should be so. But cases do occasionally come before the public which contrast 
most favourably for the order and care exercised in every well-regulated pharmacy. 
The prosecutor in the Liverpool case was probably led away by the popular delu¬ 
sion that every chemist’s profits are enormously large, and that they must of necessity 
get rich out of the public,—not being aware that one-half of the chemists in the country 
do not, as a gross return, take 20s. per day, or £365 per annum; and that the net 
profit earned by the other half little more than sufficed to keep soul and body together. 
Very few save anything, and fewer still enough to retire upon in their old days. It is 
questionable whether one in a thousand can save, by the legitimate exercise of his 
business in the course of a laborious life, so much as £10,000. And if a man in the 
course of an honourable and useful career has saved as much or more, it is no reason 
why he should be robbed of the same, and simply because he has it; for a man known 
to be poor would not be prosecuted. 
