568  Pharmacopceial  Convention  of  ipio.  |A£;iXrfi9o?' 
adopted  by  the  originators  of  our  Pharmacopoeia  is  rather  strongly 
emphasized  by  the  following  paragraph  from  the  preface  to  the  first 
U.S.P. :  "  The  value  of  a  Pharmacopoeia  depends  upon  the  fidelity 
with  which  it  conforms  to  the  best  state  of  medical  knowledge  of  the 
day.  Its  usefulness  depends  upon  the  sanction  it  receives  from  the 
medical  community  and  the  extent  to  which  it  governs  the  language 
and  the  practice  of  those  for  whose  use  it  was  intended." 
To  elaborate  on  the  reasons  for  this  evident  decline  in  the  stand- 
ards for  admission  to  our  Pharmacopoeia  would  take  us  too  far 
afield  in  the  history  of  the  evolution  of  the  U.S.P.  I  would  like, 
however,  to  call  your  attention  to  an  article  by  the  then  editor  of  the 
Pharmaceutische  Runschau,  published  in  1890,  which  contains  a 
history  of  the  Pharmacopoeia  of  the  United  States  and  clearly  out- 
lines the  relations  existing  between  the  development  of  the  Pharma- 
copoeia of  the  United  States  and  the  reasons  for  the  origin  and  con- 
tinuance of  the  United  States  Dispensatory.  The  resulting  more  or 
less  complete  dependence  of  the  Pharmacopoeia  on  the  publishers  of 
the  Dispensatory  continued  uninterruptedly,  without  as  much  as  being 
questioned,  from  1833  to  1875  when  Dr.  E.  R.  Squibb  first  suggested 
the  desirability  of  developing  the  Pharmacopoeia  of  the  United 
States  as  an  independent  publication,  thus  reverting  back  to  the 
ideas  of  the  originators  of  the  book  as  outlined  by  Drs.  Jackson 
and  Warren  in  the  preface  to  the  Pharmacopoeia  of  the  Massachu- 
setts Medical  Society  and  later  endorsed  in  the  preface  of  the 
Pharmacopoeia  of  the  United  States  itself. 
It  appears,  however,  that  Dr.  Squibb  was  at  least  three  decades 
in  advance  of  his  contemporaries  both  medical  and  pharmaceutical. 
The  American  Medical  Association,  as  organized  at  that  time,  was 
not  prepared  to  take  up  the  work  for  the  medical  profession  and 
the  members  of  the  American  Pharmaceutical  Association  were  not 
sufficiently  far  sighted  to  insist  that  the  medical  practitioners  of  the 
country  assume  their  share  of  the  duties  and  responsibilities  attend- 
ant on  the  making  of  a  really  representative  Pharmacopoeia  and  so 
the  year  1880  witnessed  what  has  been  characterized  as  the  capture 
of  the  Pharmacopoeia  by  pharmacists,  though  in  fact  it  was  nothing 
more  than  a  manifestation  of  willingness  on  the  part  of  pharmacists 
to  do  their  share  of  the  work  and  to  undertake  the  actual  drudgery 
in  connection  with  the  duties  that  more  properly  should  have  been 
assumed  by  regularly  delegated  members  of  the  medical  profession. 
In  discussing  pharmacopceial  problems  just  one  decade  since 
