374  Compounding  and  Dispensing.        { Am.  jour,  pharm. 
1  d  r  &  \      August,  1909. 
THE  LEGAL  ASPECT  OF  COMPOUNDING  AND 
DISPENSING. 
By  Allen  C.  Thomas. 
To  the  competent  pharmacist  or  druggist  the  legal  aspect  of 
compounding  and  dispensing  "  has  no  terrors."  Expressed  simply, 
the  law  requires  that  he  shall  be  equipped  with  a  practical  and  tech- 
nical knowledge  of  his  vocation  and  that  he  shall  exercise  due  care 
in  the  application  of  this  knowledge. 
By  the  law  I  mean  those  legislative  enactments,  sometimes  called 
statutes,  and  that  body  of  judicial  decisions  growing  out  of  a  deter- 
mination of  the  points  at  issue  in  the  particular  cases  presented  to 
the  Court  for  interpretation. 
These  decisions  are  based  primarily  on  the  general  principles 
governing  all  obligations  of  a  civil  and  criminal  nature,  and  second- 
arily upon  those  principles  peculiarly  applicable  to  pharmacal 
jurisprudence. 
Our  civilization  daily  becomes  more  complex,  changes  and  devel- 
opment give  rise  to  innumerable  questions  of  scientific,  social,  and 
economic  importance,  and  new  branches  are  constantly  spreading 
from  the  tree  of  legal  knowledge.  How  great  these  branches  of 
jurisprudence  may  become,  time  alone  can  tell. 
Little  more  than  a  century  ago  Blackstone,  writing  his  commen- 
taries, considered-  sixteen  or  seventeen  pages  sufficient  to  adequately 
summarize  the  law  of  corporations ;  to-day  the  commentaries  of 
Seymour  D.  Thompson  on  this  one  subject  cover  six  volumes  of 
more  than  a  thousand  pages  each  and  by  no  means  has  the  last  word 
been  said. 
From  the  year  1615  when  King  James  I  by  letters  patent  consti- 
tuted the  apothecaries  a  separate  company  of  London,  distinct  from 
that  of  the  grocers,  down  to  the  present  generation  there  was  little 
or  no  legislation  on  the  subject.  So  striking  was  this  condition  as  to 
cause  Ordronaux  to  say  when  writing,  about  1869: 
"  Strange  as  it  may  seem  in  a  country  where  so  many  law-making 
bodies  are  each  annually  producing  a  volume  of  enactments,  intended 
to  meet  ail  present  and  future  necessities  of,  or  to  supply  all  past 
deficiencies  in,  municipal  government — strange  as  it  may  seem,  a 
science  so  intimately  related  to  human  health  and  the  preservation 
