PHARMACEUTICAL ETHICS. 
151 
When a pharmaceutist will commence life on so narrow and poverty-stricken 
a scale, he deliberately courts misery and invites distress; he must accept the 
consequences, and he has no right to blame pharmacy for that for which it is in 
no way responsible. But you will justly make the remonstrance, these are 
mere business statistics; these are not ethics. Certainly they are not, but 
before we can rightly understand what ethics are, they must be clearly and 
broadly marked off from what they are not. The one point I want to bring 
home to you, and the one point I wish you to carry home from Nottingham is 
this, that the best code of ethics under heaven will not stand in the place of a 
sound judgment and trade common sense. There is a grand ethical deliverance 
to be worked out by an agency of which more hereafter. 
Let us carry the same subject out to its inevitable results, the rather as it is 
one of which most writers are afraid. There is a certain buoyancy and elasticity 
in youth ; there is also a healthy charm in novelty ; but months roll round, and 
the new proprietor of a mistake in commerce gradually looks his business in the 
face. It is too small; it presents too little scope for either his industry or his 
intelligence. In most of these cases the master is single-handed. Hard life ; 
hard times. This is the dark side of pharmacy; and if there were more things 
in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in the philosophy of Horatio, certainly 
there are more urgent cases where seasonable assistance might be availing than 
those registered on the list of our Benevolent Fund. 
And now (please to notice this) the routine of weary hours, and the tyranny 
of the pressure of small means and petty claims exert their baneful influence. 
By slow but sure degrees the man’s sympathies become contracted, and his aspi¬ 
rations blunted. Here comes in the hopeless battle against impossibilities. The 
pharmaceutist ends with losing heart, detesting pharmacy, and railing at every 
trace of ethical endeavour as so much childishness. 
Meanwhile, the shop is either sunk in neglected dirt, or has become more and 
more pretty. Vain task to attempt to jewel the holes when the mainspring is 
wanting! 
Cheap and flashy sundries have usurped the place of the little pharmacy there 
was, and the doomed establishment has sunk down into the weakest phase of a 
bazaar. Not only this, but to recruit an atrophied exchequer, marvellous nos¬ 
trums, which reflect no credit on the inventor, are gradually introduced, recom¬ 
mended by flaming placards and mendacious labels. We mourn for pharmacy, 
but we grieve most for the pharmaceutist. Sir Isaac Newton, standing behind 
that counter, goaded by similar pressing wants, and weighed down by similar 
quick necessities, might be tempted to do the same. 
Let us not write elegant essays, tricked out with points and phrases, but let 
us talk plain common sense. What forces such a proprietor on a course no 
thinking man can justify? Has he ceased in his heart of hearts to be a phar¬ 
maceutist? Has he sunk his sense of self-respect? Was he born to fritter 
away life in this unhealthy littleness ? Come round this way and I will show 
you. You see that nasty-looking animal; it is called a wolf, and he simply 
wishes to keep it from his door. 
' We have seen that the question is complicated by an extraneous difficulty; 
on the one side we have ethics and their claims, on the other the stern truth, 
Necessitas non habet leges ^—necessity has no laws. Having thus cleared the sub¬ 
ject of one of its embarrassments, we come back to the original proposition,— 
Is there a true, legitimate, i. e. ethical method for the development of the legiti¬ 
mate business of the pharmaceutist? What is, you may ask, legitimate busi¬ 
ness? And there I am afraid we shall not agree. 
Firstly, I deny, and always have denied, that pharmacy is just so far legiti¬ 
mate as it is connected or unconnected with dispensing. This is one branch, 
. and by that branch exclusively I get my living. 
