โ Scribed by Dittrich, Dr.E.W.
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Medicine, or the art of diagnosing and curing disease, has in time become a complicated science. It now comprises so many subdivisions, that various special branches have established themselves, the study of which, however complete their succession may have been, always necessitates a thorough knowledge of its fundamental developing features. Pharmacy, on the other hand, had to develop on totally different lines.
While they both, Medicine and Pharmacy, if I may say so, had the same common source, the former, as it was, developing from the latter in the course of evolution, both mutually profiting from experience aiid observation, pharmacy did never become an independent art owing to many facts that were detrimental to its development as such. For some of those disciplines which had become integral parts of pharmacy, began to develop independently and formed important scientific branches of their own. This was the case chiefly with Chemistry and Botany ; and Pharmacy, their deserted mother science, kept only in touch with its faithless children to that extent which was necessary for its object as an auxiliary discipline to the art of healing.
But it was and will always be an important cultural factor in the successful pursuit of this art.
Appreciating these latter facts, we learn to understand the importance of pharmaceutical science, not only as an aux-iliary discipline to our endeavors as physicians, but we are also forced to give it a place as a department sui generis in the great realm of hippocratic science. If it be true that some do not want to look at it in this light, and there are still many physicians that are only too ready to adversely criticise the pharmacist as a class, regardless of personality, then some misapprehensions and misunderstandings must surely be existing between these two professions. If this be so, they have existed entirely too long, and it will only be necessary to consider carefully some of the reasons which may be contributory in producing the poor opinion that some physicians entertain of so old and honorable a profession.
Pharmacy as a profession is and must be always carried on on purely scientific lines, but the practical part of it, as you all know, is peculiarily intermingled with commercial interests, features which tend to furnish the cause for estrangement between the two sister professions ; although, in my opinion, it would not harm some gentlemen of the medical profession at all to be endowed with some of this commercial instinct.
This estrangement, which lately has been kept up by the bugbear stories of counter prescribing and real o r imputed substitution, has become Secondly: *Read before the New York Branch and the Medical Society of the County of New York, May 7, 1902.
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