608 
PUBLIC OPINION ON THE TWO BILLS. 
fail even to stand appalled by the sliarae of their own incompetence. This is no 
pleasant reflection for the medical practitioner, and ought to be none for a public which, 
even while the most devoted to freedom of trade, may yet well pause before tolerating a 
licence that tampers with life by simulating and vitiating science. And it is the less 
agreeable when we find one authority after another abroad, the highest in medical 
policy and in the art of healing, exclaiming with pity against the blindness and reck¬ 
lessness of a country which leaves such specially important interests to such false and 
defective handling. 
“ It was but in giving voice, then, to the feelings of the medical profession, and in 
the exercise of a becoming solicitude for the public credit and welfare, that the General 
Medical Council, constituted under the Medical Registration Act, came lately to the 
resolution:— 
“ ‘ That a communication be addressed to the Secretary of State for the Home 
Department, drawing his attention to the present defective state of the law regarding 
the practice of pharmacy, under which any person, however ignorant, may undertake 
it; and expressing the opinion of the General Medical Council that some Legislative 
enactment is urgently called for to ensure competency in persons keeping open shops 
for dispensing medicines, and for the compounding of physicians’ and surgeons’ 
prescriptions.’ 
“On the facts and consciousness thus expressed, has ensued the introduction of two 
separate Bills into Parliament; each bearing the identical title of a ‘Chemists and 
Druggists Bill,’ but each emanating from a different source, and differing, too, in the 
extent of its aims, as in the instrumentality for their accomplishment. The first 
originates with the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, a body incorporated by 
Royal Charter in 1843, and which, in 1852, had pow'ers for the examination of Phar¬ 
maceutical Chemists, assistants, and students, conferred upon it by Act of Parliament, 
but only in so far as that examination, and its resulting attestation of competency, 
might be voluntarily sought for. This Society has now on its registers about 4000 
individuals in England and Scotland; and since 1853 it has registered none unless upon 
previous trial. It has established lectureships, a benevolent fund amounting to £7000, 
a museum and a library, a laboratory for practical instruction, and a meritorious 
journal, the agencylof which, in advancing and diffusing pharmaceutical knowledge, has 
been singularly valuable. It now asks to have confided to it, as merely an extension of 
its present functions, the duty of examining and registering all new entrants on the 
occupation of chemist and druggist, upon whom such examination is to be henceforward 
compulsory; and of simply registering, but without subjection to examination, all 
those already engaged in the exercise of the trade. Thus all present chemists and 
druggists might acquire, on the easiest of terms, an authenticated and legal position, 
ascertainable by reference to a single register common to them and to the already certi¬ 
ficated Pharmaceutical Chemists; while all future entrants would have their competence 
duly tried, and attested by their position in the same register. 
“ The rival Bill emanates from a body designating itself as the Society of Chemists and 
Druggists of England and Wales, which has existed only since 1861; but of which the 
public knows little, and the scientific world nothing, inasmuch as, being destitute of all 
apparatus for study or teaching, whether lectureship, museum, library, laboratory, or 
journal, it subsists only obscurely, with apparently an approach to the character of a 
mere trade’s guild or commercial protection society. This body seeks also to be elevated 
into a corporation, and asks from the State that fulness of power of examining and 
registering members and entrants which the older and more distinguished body already 
in part possesses; thus aspiring to establish, with exceedingly doubtful expediency, a 
second order and source of qualification for druggists, to be attested by a second and its 
own peculiar register. The Bill of the Pharmaceutical Society includes Scotland ; and 
a petition in its favour has been sent to Parliament, signed by 105 chemists aud druggists 
and their assistants resident in Edinburgh. The rival Bill is designed for England and 
Wales only. The latter Bill embodies a clause regulating the sale of poisons ; a matter 
so important in itself as to deserve a separate enactment, yet which can still easily be 
provided for by an addition to the former Bill, should it be judged fit by Parliament that 
the kind of Act contemplated ought to be at once a measure for education and for 
police—a combination the propriety and advantage of which may fairly be considered 
debateable. 
