AmMa?j904.arm'}     The  Pharmacist  and  the  Pharmacopoeia.  207 
Among  the  latter  was  Dr.  Redman  Coxe,  who,  in  his  "  American 
Dispensatory,"  attacked  some  of  the  formulas  and  minor  details  of 
the  Philadelphia  Pharmacopoeia  quite  severely,  and  appeared  to 
favor  the  acceptance  of  the  New  York  Pharmacopoeia  as  the  national 
standard. 
This  attack  was  thought  to  be  unwarranted  by  Dr.  George  B. 
Wood,  a  member  of  the  Philadelphia  revision  committee,  and  at  that 
time  professor  of  Materia  Medica  in  the  Philadelphia  College  of  Phar- 
macy. Dr.  Wood  wrote  quite  an  exhaustive  review  of  the  attacks 
(A.  J.  P.,  1832,  page  94),  in  which  he  defended  the  position  of  the 
Pharmacopoeia  and  refuted  many  of  the  arguments' that  were  used 
by  Dr.  Coxe. 
It  was  no  doubt  largely  due  to  this  attack  on  the  Pharmacopoeia, 
in  the  leading  Dispensatory  of  that  time,  that  Drs.  Wood  and  Bache 
hastened  the  publication  of  their  own  proposed  work,  the  United 
States  Dispensatory. 
The  motives  that  actuated  the  authors  of  this  book,  as  asserted 
by  Dr.  Wood,  its  originator,  were  "  to  make  the  United  States  Phar- 
macopoeia more  generally  known  and  acceptable,  and  thereby  con- 
tribute to  its  universal  practical  recognition  as  the  national  standard." 
"  The  United  States  Dispensatory  was  designed  primarily  to  be  a 
commentary  on  the  Pharmacopoeia,  giving  detailed  accounts  of  the 
medicines  it  recognized  and  explaining  and  enforcing  all  its  pro- 
cesses." 
The  general  style  and  make-up  of  the  book  was,  however,  closely 
patterned  after  that  of  the  Dispensatories  previously  published  in 
this  country,  even  so  far  as  to  include  and  comment  on  the  prepara- 
tions of  the  London,  Edinburgh  and  Dublin  Pharmacopoeias.  It 
was  largely  due  to  this  unfortunate  compliance  with  former  prece- 
dent that  the  United  States  Dispensatory  from  the  very  beginning 
took  quite  a  different  position  in  the  shop  of  the  pharmacist  from 
that  intended  for  it  by  its  authors. 
This  new  Dispensatory  was  eminently  successful  in  a  monetary 
way,  the  first  edition  was  sold  within  a  year  and  no  less  than  four 
editions  were  printed  in  the  first  decade. 
The  United  States  Dispensatory  was  practically  without  a  com- 
petitor until  1852,  when  Dr.  John  King  published  his  "  Eclectic 
Dispensatory."  This  name  was  changed  in  the  second  edition  to 
"  The  American  Eclectic  Dispensatory,"  and  later  to  "The  American 
Dispensatory." 
