ON THE STATE OP PHARMACY IN MEXICO. 71 
Physicians must be graduated Doctors of Medicine, but 
before they are permitted to practice, they must pass an exa- 
mination (state examination) before the Protomedicat. If 
they are found duly qualified, they are bound by their oath 
to act in every case according to the best of their abilities 
and their consciences ; to abstain from the performance of 
all surgical operations, unless they have passed the exami- 
nation in surgery also, and not to prepare or dispense* me- 
dicines, much less to keep an apothecary's shop ; further, 
not to take their own relations — even the most distant — 
under their treatment, to attend the poor gratis, to be con- 
tent with moderate remuneration from the rich ; and lastly, 
to promote the fulfilment of all religious duties on the bed 
of sickness and death, or they subject themselves to a fine 
of 10,000 maravedis (about forty piastres) for each case, in 
which one of their patients, by their neglect, dies without 
having received the sacrament. The law holds them, 
moreover, responsible for every culpable neglect of the 
duties of their profession. 
The apothecaries are, in the first place by law, subjected 
to a rigid examination, and then to a periodical visitation 
of their shops, beyond the precincts of which no medicines 
are allowed to be prepared. 
They are bound to reject all prescriptions not signed by 
a legal practitioner, to abstain from all medical and surgical 
practice, and never to quit their shops without leaving an 
approved and duly qualified substitute. 
All their assistants must be acquainted with Latin, and 
capable of compounding medicines accurately and quickly, 
according to prescription and the directions of the Spanish 
Pharmacopoeia. No one is permitted to open a shop or to 
take one, in a place where his father or father-in law, son 
or son-in-law are established in medical or surgical prac- 
tice. — Chem. Gazettc : from Correspondenz-Blatt fur Sud- 
Dcutschland. 
*Then there are no dispensaries in Mexico! Happy land. 
