Page:Memoir of George B. Wood, M. D., LL.D.djvu/14

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has so continued, with repeated revisals, down to the present time. Not long after completing this important work, Professor Wood began, with Professor Franklin Bache, aided for a time by Daniel B. Smith, then President of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, a very elaborate commentary upon the Pharmacopœia, under the name of the United States Dispensatory. This, which made a volume of more than a thousand large and closely printed pages, was begun and finished by its authors in less than two years. It has, since that time, passed through fourteen large editions; the aggregate number of copies sold, during Dr. Wood's life-time, amounting to 120,000 copies; as it has long been regarded as everywhere indispensable to both the medical and the pharmaceutical professions. The intimate association of Doctors Wood and Bache, in the preparation of this most useful work of reference, was only a part of the fabric of their life-long fraternal friendship. This close intimacy was the more remarkable on account of their being opposed in interest as professors in the two great rival medical schools; that of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia.

In the professorship of Materia Medica and Therapeutics in the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Wood reached the culmination of his reputation as a public Teacher. He was one of the leaders in that great reform in instruction upon scientific subjects, which