AmAprii'i905*rm'}        Professionalism  vs.  Commercialism.  163 
a  glance  whether  a  bale  of  drugs,  like  sarsaparilla  or  ipecac,  is  of 
good  or  poor  quality.  He  does  not  bother  his  mind  with  the  ques- 
tion whether  the  drugs  under  consideration  contain  an  alkaloid,  an 
oil,  or  a  resin  ;  whether  they  are  poisonous  or  salubrious.  His 
experience  tells  him  that  they  are  good  objects  for  commercial 
enterprise,  and  in  this  sense  alone  he  is  interested  in  them.  The 
pharmacist  looks  upon  his  goods  from  a  different  standpoint.  The 
questions  that  are  uppermost  in  his  mind  in  handling  the  same  arti- 
cles cannot  be  solved  by  practical  experience.  Their  answers  are 
based  on  knowledge,  on  education. 
To  say,  therefore,  that  education  in  pharmacy  is  an  unnecessary 
thing  means  retrogression.  The  advancement  of  the  human  race  is 
based  on  education,  on  enlightenment,  and  the  repudiation  of  any 
established  science  by  its  disciples  is  indirectly  a  step  toward  bar- 
barism. To  wipe  out  the  educational  part  of  pharmacy  would  be  to 
wipe  out  pharmacy  itself.  It  would  mean  to  divest  a  growing  and 
beautiful  plant  of  its  leaves  and  flowers,  leaving  the  bare  stem  as  a 
monument  of  folly  and  destructiveness. 
We  arrive  at  the  same  result  if  we  commence  our  argument  from 
the  opposite  end.  What  is  a  pharmacist?  The  answer  is:  a  per- 
son skilled  in  the  art  and  science  of  compounding  and  preparing 
medicines.  He  is  not  simply  a  thoughtless  mixer  of  different  mate- 
rials, and  the  compounding  of  medicines  can  in  no  way  be  compared 
to  the  mixing  of  mortar,  or  the  mixing  of  oils  and  paints.  The 
very  definition  of  the  word  implies  education.  But  to  the  public 
and  in  law  it  implies  more.  It  is  the  established  principle  in  all 
civilized  communities,  that  the  pharmacist  is  responsible  for  the 
quality  of  his  goods,  and  that  he  is,  and  must  be,  a  judge  of  what  is 
good  or  injurious  to  the  health  of  his  clients.  Nobody  expects  any 
responsibility  from  the  purely  commercial  man.  If  the  bale  of 
ipecac  that  he  sells  turns  out  to  be  of  inferior  quality,  the  buyer 
claims  a  proportional  credit — which  is  generally  granted — and  the 
transaction  ends.  But  if  the  pharmacist  dispenses  a  preparation  of 
ipecac  that  by  inferiority  or  faulty  compounding  causes  injurious 
results,  he  is  held  responsible  in  every  direction,  and  he  may  not 
only  be  sued  for  damages,  but  also  held  criminally.  In  our  own 
ranks,  the  men  who  for  the  last  five  years  have  worked  very  faith- 
fully for  the  elevation  of  the  commercial  side  of  pharmacy,  almost 
to  the  exclusion  of  all  professionalism,  have  yet  unconsciously 
