374 
Pharmacy  of  Useful  Drugs. 
f  Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
1     August,  1915. 
official  and  non-official  drugs  and  preparations  because  teachers  of 
materia  medica  subjects  referred  to  them  in  their  lectures  and  dis- 
cussed them  in  their  text-books.  From  this  conclusion  it  became 
evident  that  if  the  members  of  state  medical  examining  and  licensing 
boards  could  be  induced  to  restrict  their  examinations  in  materia 
medica  subjects  to  a  more  limited  list  of  articles  more  time  could  be 
devoted  to  their  study.  Conversely,  if  instruction  in  materia  medica 
subjects  could  be  restricted  to  the  comprehensive  consideration  of  a 
reasonably  limited  number  of  widely-used  and  thoroughly  well-estab- 
lished articles  the  student  could  be  given  a  thorough  grounding  in 
the  properties  and  uses  of  the  several  drugs  and  preparations,  and 
this  would  go  far  toward  eliminating  many,  if  not  all,  of  the  then 
existing  abuses. 
The  acceptation  of  such  a  list  of  useful  drugs,  it  was  further 
thought,  might  serve  as  an  added  incentive  for  the  development  of 
international  standards  of  purity  and  strength  of  widely-used  medica- 
ments. 
The  original  list  was  compiled  in  cooperation  with  the  Council  on 
Medical  Education  of  the  American  Medical  Association,  and  was 
subsequently  submitted  to  members  of  the  National  Confederation  of 
State  Medical  Examining  and  Licensing  Boards.  It  was  later  sub- 
mitted to  teachers  of  materia  medica  and  therapeutics  in  medical 
schools  and  to  members  of  state  medical  examining  and  licensing 
boards,  and,  finally,  through  the  columns  of  the  Journal  of  the 
American  Medical  Association,  to  medical  practitioners  generally. 
The  principles  guiding  the  inclusion  of  articles  in  the  list  of  useful 
drugs  were  primarily  based  on  the  continued  extensive  use  of  a 
drug  or  preparation,  on  the  reports  of  clinical  experiments  as  re- 
flected in  current  literature,  and  on  the  reports  of  experimental  work 
done  in  pharmacologic  laboratories  and  in  hospitals  equipped  with 
proper  laboratory  facilities. 
Recognizing  the  influence  of  current  medical  literature,  even  when 
evidently  of  an  advertising  nature,  the  Council  has  included  in  the 
list  of  useful  drugs  a  number  of  articles  not  now  included  in  the 
Pharmacopeia  of  the  United  States  or  to  be  included  in  the  revision 
now  in  press. 
In  round  numbers  the  present  list  of  useful  drugs  includes  450 
titles,  of  which  231  may  be  classed  as  drugs  and  chemicals,  173  as 
preparations,  43  as  definitions  of  forms  of  drugs,  and  13  as  cross 
references. 
