Am.  Jour.  Pbarm. 
Feb.,  1891. 
Prescription  Ownership. 
89 
the  treatment  of  every  sick  person  must  of  necessity  vary  with  the 
personal  idiosyncrasies  of  each  case. 
To  whom,  then,  does  the  prescription  legally  belong  ?  To  the 
physician  ?  Certainly  not.  He  has  been  paid  for  all  services 
rendered.  To  the  patient  ?  No  ;  for  in  his  recovery  to  health  he 
has  received  all  that  he  paid  his  medical  adviser  for.  To  the  phar- 
macist ?  Yes ;  by  every  right  of  custom  and  law,  provided  he  has 
accepted  it  under  certain  conditions.  If  the  patient  makes  a  request 
for  its  return  on  presenting  it,  the  pharmacist  has  one  of  two  lines 
of  action  before  him.  He  must  either  refuse  to  compound  it  under 
such  conditions,  or,  express  a  willingness  to  compound  it  and  give  a 
duplicate  copy.  If  the  latter  proposal  be  refused,  he  should  return 
the  original  prescription  without  compounding.  On  the  other  hand, 
if  the  prescription  is  committed  to  his  hands  with  no  primary 
request  for  its  returnal  after  being  filled,  and  he  has  affixed  his 
marks  of  identity  and  compounded  it,  he  should  retain  the  original 
copy  as  legal  evidence  that  he  has  prepared  such  a  prescription. 
As  showing  the  legal  value  of  a  prescription  it  may  be  of  interest 
to  state  that  Mr.  Robert  England  informs  me,  he  has  been  subpoenaed 
in  three  cases  within  the  last  three  years  to  produce  certain  original 
prescriptions  for  the  purposes  of  first,  To  prove  attendance  in  a  suit 
for  medical  services.  Suit  was  won.  Second,  To  prove  that  a  phys- 
ician used  drugs  for  malpractice.  Physician  convicted ;  and,  third,  To 
prove  that  a  medical  student  illegally  practised  medicine.  In  this 
latter  case,  the  patient  dying  and  the  student  being  unable  to  give  a 
certificate  of  death,  the  case  was  examined  by  the  Coroner,  and 
when  confronted  with  the  prescriptions  confessed  guilty.  In  each 
instance,  however,  the  legal  authorities  returned  the  prescriptions, 
thus  tacitly  admitting  their  ownership. 
But  this  whole  question  of  prescription  ownership,  to  my  mind,  is 
essentially  one  of  law,  and  viewing  it  from  that  standpoint,  it  pre- 
sents some  most  interesting  features.  I  have  been  fortunate  in 
securing  for  this  afternoon's  meeting  an  expression  of  opinion  from 
that  eminent  authority  on  civil  law,  Mr.  Richard  C.  McMurtrie,  of 
this  city. 
He  writes  me  as  follows : 
BulutT  Building,  January  15,  1891. 
Dear  Sir :  You  ask  who  is  the  owner  of  a  prescription  ?    The  physician  who 
writes  it,  the  patient  for  whose  use  it  is  written,  or  the  apothecary  to  whom  it 
is  handed  to  compound  ? 
