566 
Pharmacopceial  Convention  of  1010.    |A™-  Jour-  pharm 
£  I    December,  1909. 
them  significant,  can  surely  not  be  interpreted  other  than  as  indicat- 
ing that  the  U.S. P.  VIII  when  put  to  a  crucial  test  failed  to  meet 
the  requirements  as  a  legal  standard  for  the  articles  described  in 
its  pages. 
To  the  critical  observer  it  must  be  at  once  apparent  that  these 
two  really  vital  deficiencies  in  the  present  Pharmacopoeia  of  the 
United  States  involve  practically  all  of  the  problems  that  will  pre- 
sent themselves  for  solution  by  the  Pharmacopceial  Revision  Con- 
vention that  will  meet  in  the  City  of  Washington,  in  May,  1910, 
for  it  goes  without  saying  that  unless  these  fundamental  shortcom- 
ings can  be  corrected  and  their  recurrence  avoided  the  Pharmacopoeia 
fails  in  the  very  mission  for  which  it  was  designed:  to  serve  as  a 
book  of  standards  for  the  medicaments  used  by  physicians  in  the 
cure  and  prevention  of  disease. 
I  must  admit  that  I  am  one  of  the  few,  or  many,  to  believe  that 
practically  all  of  the  important  pharmacopceial  problems  can  be  satis- 
factorily solved  by  requiring  that  a  representative  committee  of 
physicians,  dentists,  and  veterinarians  decide  on  the  admissions  to 
the  Pharmacopoeia  and  that  the  Committee  of  Revision,  consisting 
of  pharmacologists,  pharmaceutical-chemists,  pharmacognosists,  and 
pharmacists,  be  instructed  to  give  full  and  complete  publicity  to  all 
of  their  conclusions  before  finally  deciding  on  the  text  of  the  Phar- 
macopoeia as  it  is  to  appear. 
It  will  of  course  be  said  that  in  the  past  physicians  have  had 
much  if  not  all  of  the  say  as  to  what  is  to  go  into  the  Pharmacopoeia, 
and  for  answer  I  will  point  out  that  not  since  the  compilation  of  the 
original  Pharmacopoeia  of  the  United  States  has  any  concerted 
attempt  been  made  to  learn  what  the  really  active  and  responsible 
men  in  the  medical  profession  desire  to  have  incorporated  in  the 
Pharmacopoeia  and  what  medicaments  actually  represent  the  con- 
temporaneous stage  of  development  in  the  therapeutic  art. 
One  hundred  and  one  years  have  passed  into  the  eternity  of 
yesterday  since  the  first  American  Pharmacopoeia  was  published  in 
the  City  of  Boston  by  the  Massachusetts  Medical  Society.  The 
authors  of  this  early  Pharmacopoeia  were  men  of  erudition,  were 
leaders  in  their  profession,  and  were  possessed  of  that  intuitive  sense 
of  responsibility  that  prompted  them  to  consider  the  public  welfare 
rather  than  popular  practices  as  the  basis  for  admission  of  an  article 
to  the  Pharmacopoeia.  They  assert  that :  "  It  is  the  intention  of  a 
Pharmacopoeia  to  point  out  those  articles  whose  properties  entitle 
