Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
Nov.,  19 18. 
Editorial. 
751 
This  announcement  is  the  outcome  of  a  conference  held  in  Wash- 
ington on  Sunday,  September  29,  between  Dr.  Maclaurin,  whose  sig- 
nature is  attached  to  the  letter,  and  seven  representatives  of  univer- 
sity schools  of  pharmacy.  While  heralded  in  some  quarters  as  a 
great  achievement  and  as  a  real  recognition  of  pharmacy  and  possi- 
bly the  forerunner  of  the  establishment  of  a  pharmaceutical  corps 
in  the  U.  S.  Army,  a  more  deliberate  judgment  will  demonstrate 
that  it  is  only  a  quasi  recognition  and  not  such  an  actual  recognition 
of  modern  educated  pharmacists  as  that  accorded,  by  virtue  of  con- 
gressional enactments,  to  the  other  divisions  of  medicine  represented 
in  the  Army  Medical  Department  and  certainly  not  comparable  with 
the  fair  recognition  of  pharmacy  for  which  representative  pharma- 
cists have  been  contending  in  their  plea  for  a  pharmaceutical  corps. 
The  history  of  that  Sunday  conference,  so  far  as  made  public, 
leaves  much  to  be  explained  and  more  to  be  surmised  and  com- 
mented upon.  No  explanation  has  as  yet  been  made  as  to  the  pre- 
liminary conferences  and  as  to  the  responsibility  for  the  suggestions 
to  the  Committee  on  Education  and  Special  Training  as  to  which 
schools  of  pharmacy  should  be  invited  to  the  conference  and  to  par- 
ticipate in  the  proposed  pharmacy  units  of  the  Students'  Army 
Training  Corps.  It  is,  however,  possible  that  there  may  have  been 
some  connection  between  this  movement  and  certain  meetings  of 
some  of  the  members  of  the  faculties  of  the  university  schools,  the 
details  of  which  have  not  been  placed  before  their  associates  in  the 
American  Conference  of  Pharmaceutical  Faculties. 
There  is  no  denying  the  fact  that  there  has  been  a  deliberate 
shaping  of  this  movement  in  such  a  manner  as  to  be  favorable  to 
the  interests  of  those  schools  of  pharmacy  who  are  allied  to  univer- 
sities and  to  discriminate  against  those  schools  who  have  so  far  kept 
aloof  from  such  affiliation.  This  is  but  another  evidence  of  that 
factional  spirit  that  has  been  so  energetically  developed  in  the  con- 
ference named  and  which  if  persisted  in  may  result  in  making  that 
body  a  "  dissociated  association." 
It  is  foreign  to  the  purpose  of  the  writer  to  reflect  in  the  least 
upon  the  standing  of  any  school  of  pharmacy  that  has  been  admitted 
to  membership  in  the  American  Conference  of  Pharmaceutical  Fac- 
ulties or  that  has  been  selected  as  a  training  school  for  the  S.  A. 
T.  C.  As  these  events,  however,  are  of  national  interest  and  of 
vital  importance  to  American  pharmacy,  they  are  properly  the  sub- 
ject for  frank  criticism.    The  facts  at  hand  show  that  the  oppor- 
