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not exclude poisons from the Vatican cannot afford to say much regarding a not uncommon Eastern solution of difficulties: the counsel, συμβουλίη, as a preliminary, suggests the existence of men against whom the lofty principles of the Oath were a needful protest and protection.
At that time the physician gave out the drugs from his private stores, and thus might, without detection, do evil. Next came the stage when each physician had his own formulæ, and so restricted his patients to those acquainted with these formulæ, to whom indeed he had assigned the monopoly. The practice still survives: "Prescription No. 1" is not an utterly unknown formula whereby practitioner and drug-seller are partners, a custom against which prohibitive regulations are ineffectual. I have before me examples from an English provincial town where such co-partnery is all but avowed. It might be defended on the ground that in Hippocrates' day the drugs were included in the fee for attendance: this we know still as the way of "shilling a visit and bring your own bottle" practitioners, whose interests are inimical to those dispensaries which, with senior students as visitors, gave the most valuable training when I was a student. I do not know if such institutions still exist on the same lines, but I do know that the attempt to introduce the plan into Glasgow some years ago was brilliantly unsuccessful. The Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons still appoint Inspectors of Drugs, who, even in the days when their power was more absolute, could not altogether prevent curious pharmacy. An old practitioner in the West recently told of a candidate who "knew how ipecacuan was made": "half an ounce of tartar emetic to a pound of pease meal." This represented the practical mode of pharmacy in the eastern part of a large town. But it is not a dozen of years since a practitioner on the other side of the Border dismissed an assistant who insisted on the use of a certain drug which the young woman who dispensed Bottle No. 1, Bottle No. 2, etc., knew nothing about, could not well know since she combined pharmacy with domestic duties. The young lady took the bottles as marked, ignorant of their contents, just as in the sea-port tales of skipper and mate dealing with the B.T. medicine chest.
