Am.  Jour.  Phairu.  ) 
August,  1913.  j 
The  New  Drugstore. 
371 
will  no  longer  be  gathered  from  the  fields  but  from  the  laboratory. 
In  fancy,  we  may  look  forward  toward  a  day  when  out  of  the 
test  tube  life  itself  will  emerge.  Man's  destiny  will  be  governed  by 
the  whirl  of  the  benzine  ring.  In  the  drugstore  of  the  future  the 
shelves  will  need  to  be  wide,  broad  and  long  to  store  the  coming 
medicaments  and  appliances. 
New  Avenues  of  Trade 
The  modern  doctor  is  either  a  specialist  or  a  hospital  attendant 
— in  the  advance  of  medicine  and  surgery  the  family  doctor  has 
disappeared  and  no  one  has  yet  arisen  who  can  take  his  place. 
A  busy  practitioner  of  my  acquaintance  says  that  on  an  average  he  sees 
his  patients  not  more  than  twice  and  then  only  for  a  fifteen-minute  session. 
His  assistants  take  the  blood  pressure,  examine  the  urine  and  note  symp- 
toms; for  treatment,  the  patients  go  into  the  hands  of  an  operator  or  nurse. 
Nowadays  the  doctor  ha^s  neither  time  nor  the  inclination  to 
reach  the  intimate  relations  that  once  existed  between  the  family 
and  their  physician. 
Here  may  be  a  field  for  the  coming  pharmacist,  a  source  of 
traffic  for  the  future  druggist.  Why  not  become  the  advisor,  pur- 
veyor and  caretaker  of  the  physical  life  of  the  race?  This  swings 
the  pendulum  back  to  the  corner  drugstore — the  olden  centre  of 
wisdom  and  advice. 
Preventive  Medicine 
One  of  the  brightest  spots  in  the  history  of  the  past  half  hun- 
dred years  is  the  achievement  of  medicine.  Heretofore  the  term 
"  preventive  "  has  been  limited  to  sanitation  and  hygiene,  as  applied 
to  contagious  diseases,  but  now  the  field  of  its  operations  include 
every  agency  and  influence  that  contribute  toward  man's  uplift — 
to  his  moral,  ethical  and  athletic  development — his  intellectual  and 
physical  perfection.  The  field  of  preventive  medicine  is  broad  and 
wide  enough  for  the  trained  mind  of  the  pharmacist  to  find  a  work 
place.  It  is  a  field  that  contains  a  clientage  which  will  more  and 
more  demand  commodities  from  the  drugstore.  Thus  far  this 
province  has  been  inadequately  manned,  by  self-sacrificing  practi- 
tioners of  medicine  and  philanthropic  laymen — the  harvest  has  been 
plenty,  but  the  laborers  have  been  few. 
