A January Pi903m'}     Recent  Literature  Relating  to  Pharmacy.  43 
INTERNATIONAL  STANDARD  OF  POTENT  REMEDIES. 
Doubtless  it  would  not  be  practicable  to  provide  in  the  Pharma- 
copoeia that  all  tinctures  should  be  prepared  with  a  view  to  uni- 
formity of  dose,  desirable  as  such  a  provision  would  be  as  a  means 
of  relieving  the  practitioner  of  medicine  of  the  task  of  remember- 
ing a  lot  of  varying  doses.  Perhaps,  however,  there  might  be  a 
nearer  approach  than  has  yet  been  made  to  a  division  of  tinctures 
— and  of  other  preparations,  for  that  matter — into  classes,  the  dose 
of  each  member  of  any  particular  class  to  be  the  same.  At  all 
events,  the  various  official  formularies  of  the  world  should  show  a 
closer  approximation  to  uniformity  in  the  strength  of  their  prep- 
arations than  is  the  case  at  present.  Especially  is  this  desirable  in 
the  case  of  very  energetic  drugs,  in  order  that  overdosing  by  mis- 
take may  be  avoided. 
A  glaring  example  of  the  discrepancy  in  question  was  made  the 
subject  of  a  paper  read  at  the  recent  annual  meeting  of  the  Ameri- 
can Pharmaceutical  Association  by  Mr.  M.  I.  Wilbert,  of  the  German 
Hospital,  Philadelphia.  The  example  pointed  out  by  Mr.  Wilbert 
is  that  of  the  United  States  tincture  of  aconite,  which  contains 
35  per  cent,  of  the  drug,  whereas  that  of  France,  Hungary  and 
Portugal  contains  20  per  cent.,  that  of  Germany,  Austria,  Italy, 
Russia,  Roumania,  Holland  and  Switzerland  10  per  cent.,  and  that 
of  Great  Britain  only  5  per  cent.  The  American  tincture  of  this 
very  poisonous  drug  is,  therefore,  seven  times  as  strong  as  the  Brit- 
ish. It  might  easily  happen,  since  English  medical  writings  are 
much  read  in  this  country,  that  an  inexperienced  American  physi- 
cian should  prescribe  of  our  own  tincture  the  dose  recommended  by 
an  English  writer  of  the  British  preparation.  His  patient  would 
then  get  seven  times  as  much  aconite  at  a  dose  as  the  writer  relied 
on  had  intended.  Little  is  known  by  the  great  mass  of  practition- 
ers in  different  countries  of  the  discrepancies  of  the  pharmacopoeias, 
and  when  one  finds  a  certain  number  of  drops  of  tincture  of  aconite 
recommended  for  a  dose,  he  is  very  apt  not  to  remember  that  the 
tincture  which  the  author  had  in  mind  is  a  very  different  thing  from 
the  tincture  that  he  himself  is  in  the  habit  of  prescribing.  There 
is  certainly  danger  in  the  existence  of  such  a  difference  between  the 
aconite  tinctures  of  two  nations  speaking  the  same  tongue. 
But  our  official  formulary  is  improving  in  respect  to  this  particu- 
lar preparation,  for  when  aconite  was  first  made  official  in  the 
