From Physick to Pharmacology by Louise Hill Curth

Author:Louise Hill Curth [Curth, Louise Hill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780754635970
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2006-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Activities and Opposition

The significance of the chemists’ medical activities, most particularly counter-prescribing, is confirmed by the growing concern they aroused amongst contemporaries, especially the group most threatened by these activities: doctors. Clearly, nineteenth-century doctors recognized that there was considerable potential for overlap between their own activities and those of chemists and druggists, and regarded them as serious competitors for custom. They became one of the main — though far from sole — targets for attacks upon unqualified medical practice. Criticisms of chemists and druggists tended to latch on to the theme that their activities constituted a threat to the population, because of their indiscriminate prescribing and sale of adulterated, even poisonous, articles, but the medical profession were also honest enough to stress their anxieties concerning the chemists’ usurpation of the role of qualified medical men. In 1853, a leading article in the Medical Times & Gazette complained: ‘we reflect, that already the Profession is yearly deprived — we might almost say robbed — of thousands of pounds by pharmaceutists, who prescribe over their counters or even boldly visit patients at their own homes’.43

Much concern was expressed in parliamentary reports about the danger of resorting to chemists and druggists in the case of illness. In 1854, Thomas Gilbert, Superintendent Registrar for Bristol, stated in his evidence to the Select Committee on Medical Relief that many children died without their parents consulting a medical practitioner because ‘the difficulty of getting medical aid leads them either to doctor them according to an old Woman’s directions, or to take them simply to druggists, who know nothing about the disease, and get them a little quackery’.44 The particular danger to the public represented by ‘persons who have had no professional education as druggists, and acting as oilmen, grocers, or village shopkeepers’, while at the same time functioning as chemists and druggists, was stressed in the 1864 Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council. Whilst unacquainted with the properties of often very powerful drugs, these individuals were free to retail them directly to the public without check or control, and because of carelessness and ignorance, many serious mistakes were made, leading to illness, poisoning or death.45 Referring to the danger that chemists represented to the populations of large towns, H.W. Rumsey, in evidence to the 1844 Select Committee on Medical Poor Relief, quoted the report of Mr Dorrington of Manchester: ‘It is perfectly frightful to contemplate the loss of life amongst young children and infants arising from the practice of numerous druggists in the poorer parts of the town.’ Rumsey claimed that this impression was typical of his returns from forty English towns, adding that ‘the great bulk of the poorer classes who cannot obtain medical relief in a legitimate way are driven to druggists and unqualified practitioners’. In Wakefield, Rumsey stated, ‘probably from 4,000 to 5,000 poor resort annually to the druggists’ (approximately one-third of the population). In other communities, the picture was similar. In Southampton, ‘quite as many of the poor are prescribed for by druggists as by regular practitioners’.

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