Am.  Jour.  Pharm.  ) 
August,  1915.  J 
Pharmacy  of  Useful  Drugs. 
375 
As  suggested  above,  the  list. is  primarily  intended  to  be  educa- 
tional and  to  reflect  as  nearly  as  is  practicable  the  best  medical 
practices  of  the  time.  The  object  is  not  to  restrict  teaching  in  medical 
schools  to  this  list,  but  to  make  sure  that  medical  students  are  given  a 
comprehensive  and  satisfactory  training  regarding  the  properties  and 
uses  of  the  several  articles  and  are  duly  impressed  with  their  short- 
comings and  limitations. 
It  is  satisfactory  to  note,  in  this  connection,  that  teachers  in 
medical  schools  generally  have  evidenced  an  appreciation  of  the 
need  for  devoting  an  additional  amount  of  time  to  the  consideration 
of  the  more  important  medicaments,  and  there  is  now  a  fair  prospect 
that  future  graduates  in  medicine  will  be  given  ample  instruction 
to  develop  an  efficient  therapeutic  armamentarium. 
The  pharmacy  of  this  list  of  useful  drugs  has  as  yet  not  received 
the  care  and  attention  that  is  properly  due  it.  Pharmacists  generally 
do  not  appear  to  realize  that  much,  if  not  all,  of  the  dissatisfaction 
with  established  or  well-known  drugs  is  due  to  the  fact  that  as  these 
drugs  reach  the  patient  they  are  frequently  not  strictly  in  accord 
with  the  requirements  of  established  standards. 
The  compilation  of  data  from  the  reports  of  state  boards  of 
health  and  of  state  food  and  drug  inspectors,  as  presented  in  the 
several  volumes  of  the  "  Digest  of  Comments  on  the  Pharmacopoeia 
of  the  United  States  and  on  the  National  Formulary/'  clearly  shows 
that  fully  50  per  cent,  of  the  more  widely-used  preparations  do  not 
comply  within  reasonable  limits  with  official  requirements.  The 
chemist  of  the  Maine  Agricultural  Experiment  Station,  in  a  recent 
comment  on  this  shortcoming,  says,  in  part : 
"  It  is  rather  startling  to  find  that  half  of  the  pharmaceutical 
preparations  examined,  which  are  as  simple  to  make  as  a  batch  of 
biscuit,  differ  more  than  10  per  cent,  from  the  standard." 
The  object  of  pharmacy  is  to  exercise  control  over  the  identity 
and  purity  of  articles  used  as  medicine,  and,  while  it  is  generally 
admitted  that  the  average  pharmacist  cannot  well  be  expected  to 
systematically  examine  all  of  the  thousands  of  articles  carried  in 
stock,  there  is  practically  no  reason  why  he  should  not  concentrate 
his  efforts  and  ability  on  the  limited  number  of  articles  included  in  the 
list  of  useful  drugs  so  as  to  assure  physicians  and  others  that  the 
articles  included  in  this  list  will  uniformly  comply  with  the  official 
requirements. 
