THE  AMERICAN 
JOURNAL  OF  PHARMACY 
SEPTEMBER,  1906. 
RESUME  OF  CRITICISMS  OF  THE  U.S.I 
Apothecary  at  the  German  Hospital,  Philadelphia. 
By  M.  I.  WllyBERT, 
I 
To  the  pharmacist  who  is  willing  to  assist  in  the  progress  of 
American  pharmacy  the  recently  published,  and  now  official,  eighth 
decennial  revision  of  the  Pharmacopoeia  of  the  United  States  of 
America  must,  even  now,  be  second  in  interest  and  importance  to 
the  prospective  ninth  decennial  revision  that  will  be  published  by  a 
committee  on  revision  to  be  appointed  at  the  National  Convention 
for  Revising  the  Pharmacopoeia,  to  be  held  in  the  city  of  Wash- 
ington, in  May,  1910. 
To  make  this  prospective  Pharmacopoeia  even  more  representative 
of  the  ideas,  ideals  and  practices  that  dominate  the  practice  of 
pharmacy  in  this  country  at  the  time,  should  be  the  ambition  of 
every  active  member  of  the  profession  for  whom  the  Pharmacopoeia 
is  more  directly  intended  as  a  text-book  and  guide. 
To  do  this,  and  to  do  it  at  all  satisfactorily,  it  will  be  necessary 
that  every  page,  every  monograph,  and  even  every  line  of  text  in 
the  present  Pharmacopoeia  be  subjected  to  a  critical  examination 
with  a  view  of  finding  errors  or  discrepancies  in  the  theories  and 
supposed  facts  therein  presented. 
To  direct,  and  if  possible  aid  in,  the  observation  and  study  of 
these  possible  shortcomings,  it  is  proposed  to  publish  from  time  to 
time,  as  material  and  space  permit,  extracts  from  criticisms  of  the 
Pharmacopoeia  and  pharmacopceial  matter  published  elsewhere. 
While  commendatory  notices  of  a  book  of  the  nature  of  a  phar- 
macopoeia must  necessarily  be  justly  numerous,  and  in  many  respects 
interesting,  they  have  little  or  no  use  in  fostering  a  spirit  of  critical 
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