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BKITISH PHARMACEUTICAL CONFERENCE. 
But while there are ethics which concern humanity in general, there are others 
which belong specially to pharmacy. I confess I have felt no small difficulty in 
constructing the framework of this essay. There is a great danger of crowding 
the main theme with details, useful and important in themselves, but relatively 
of minor interest. 
I have preferred assigning to these a stated place so as to give connection to 
the thought, but leaving them with little, or even with no description ; and I 
have done this of set purpose, in order that a few grand ethical principles which 
materially concern us should be prominently brought forward. 
Let me introduce the subject % some remarks on— 
Section I. 
THE ETHICS OF THE SHOP. 
Pharmacy is a trade. When a man buys goods at one price to sell them at 
another, gaining the advantage of the difference in tariff, being further in¬ 
fluenced by the known law of supply and demand, he is engaged in trade. 
When he buys in undivided bulk, to sell again in undivided bulk, he is a mer¬ 
chant, but still engaged in trade. When he purchases in undivided bulk to 
vend in large though in divided bulk, he is a wholesale tradesman. When 
he buys articles in divided bulk, to sell again in small divided bulk, he is a 
retail tradesman ; nor does it make the slightest difference whether he sells 
hats or Turkey rhubarb, nor whether the seller of the rhubarb be Sir Humphry 
Davy. 
The artist, on the other hand, is a professional man. One painter buys so 
many feet of canvas, together with so much paint; he places possibly upon that 
canvas something which may not increase its value. A second buys the same 
amount of canvas, inch by inch, on which he puts the same amount of colour, 
ounce for ounce, and the result may be ‘‘ The Immaculate Conception.” 
He places on the canvas that which he cannot buy^—God gave it him, and with¬ 
out any phrase of poetry he exercises the gift divine. Neither is the true 
artist influenced by the necessities of competition, nor by the trade fluctuation 
arising from supply and demand. 
A hundred artists more or less would not alter his position; a hundred paint¬ 
ings on the same subject would not detract from the merit of his own. Its 
value is intrinsic, and not relative. But the pharmaceutist buys his stock 
whether of drugs, chemicals, or sundries, in order to sell again,—he is a tradesman. 
But other influences are at wmrk to modify the general fact—the awakening 
claims of universal education, the long unfaltering teaching of our own Society, 
the actual pressure from without. Then there is the influence of locality: the 
West End customer will have more than shop dexterity, and in my own neigh¬ 
bourhood the mere tradesman would find himself gazetted. 
There is the influence of individual character. The master, fortunately for 
himself and those around him, has higher than trade instincts, from which cir¬ 
cumstance his trade assumes more or less a strictly professional character; but 
it no more ceases to be a trade, than the orchid which counterfeits so strangely 
shapes of natural beauty ceases to be a plant. 
Never forgetting the essentially trade nature which belongs to pharmacy, we 
at once come to the first ethical rule of the pharmaceutist, namely, the neces¬ 
sity for the absolutely genuine character of his drugs. No drug or remedy 
should be admitted into his shop other than that which, in case of dangerous 
illness, he would not hesitate to supply to the inmates of his own family circle. 
He cannot be expected to keep the whole range of Materia Medica, nor is he 
to be blamed for applying for eclectic remedies elsewhere. This is an affair of 
