PHARMACEUTICAL ETHICS. 
145 
Section III. 
MEDICAL ETHICS. 
The behaviour of the Pharmaceutist with regard to the Medical Profession. 
Thanks to the educational pressure from without, added to which is the sense 
of personal responsibility, the pharmaceutist is daily ceasing to be the mere vendor 
of his drugs; unconsciously, by recognizing the necessity of thoroughly under¬ 
standing the nature and properties of remedial agents, he is working out the 
ethics of his trade. “The maintenance of the public health” (I condense 
from Mr, Howden) “requires the service of three separate offices. 1. The 
sanitary office, which enforces the observation of natural laws. 2. The phy¬ 
sician’s office, which investigates the nature of disease and studies the method 
of subduing it. 3. The pharmaceutical office, which consists in the skilful se¬ 
lection and preparation of remedies, and their direct application according to 
the physician’s method. By virtue therefore of his own position, and his mutual 
relation with at least this second health officer, the pharmaceutist cannot 
worthily discharge his duty unless by deliberate cultivation he has made himself 
the fit companion and seconder of the physician.” 
It has been stated that the medical profession look with a jealous eye on the 
intellectual advance of the modern pharmaceutist. This is directly contrary to 
my own experience, and I believe it to be sheer nonsense. Why a professional 
man should tremble because his directions are likely to be understood and pro¬ 
perly carried out, is beyond my feeble logic to explain. The one least likely to 
interfere with him in a professional career is the man who knows most of the 
varied action and the strength of drugs, and the therapeutic value of remedial 
agents. Such a pharmaceutist may be too nervous, bur he will never be too 
rash, and the physician may rest in perfect confidence that the educated, intelli¬ 
gent dispenser will be the last to rush in where angels fear to tread. 
I cannot conceal the fact that in some communications which have reached 
me, the question of the mutual bearing, or rather of the boundary-line that 
marks off the medical man and the pharmaceutist, has not been fairly stated. 
Either under pressure of a felt grievance or from limited observation, strictures 
have been passed on the profession which are scarcely to be justified, and the 
matter has been argued too exclusively from our own point of view. 
Ileasoning from the broad abstract theory, it is better for the surgeon to 
•eonfine himself entirely to professional practice; but when we descend into or¬ 
dinary life, there does not seem to be any valid reason why he should not be (if 
so he chooses) his own dispenser. This neither includes nor justifies the esta¬ 
blishment on his part of an open retail, a proceeding which exacts its own 
Nemesis. The man degrades the shop, and the shop degrades the man. What 
confidence can the patient feel in an adviser who has so little in himself ? 
But that a surgeon should be debarred from compounding his own remedies 
is unfair to him and would often be unjust to others. The plan may have been 
dictated from motives of dispatch; in hundreds of outlying districts, from neces¬ 
sity ; nor let it be forgotten that it may have been suggested also from the desire 
to have excellent and first-class preparations. Nor can I share the opinion that 
the private dispensary is a term synonymous with negligent dispensing and 
cheaply selected drugs. I am personally acquainted with some establishments 
which are models of what in pharmacy we might be content to imitate. The 
evil (if such it be) will in time work out its own remedy; for just in propor¬ 
tion as the recognized open pharmacy assumes a higher standing, and offers 
more professional facilities, will the private dispensary be felt by the proprietor 
to be a thing irksome and unnecessary, and, following the law of all progres¬ 
sion, it will eventually disappear. But, on the other hand, there is a wretclied 
•practice which, wherever it exists, must stifle the ethics of the profession and 
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