Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Observations on medical weights and measures. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![ness to the consideration of the topic before us. Manifestlv, if any ch ange be discovered to be necessary, in any single department of pharmacy, such a cliange can be best accomplished now, when the various otlier alterations requisite to bring into harmony the different pharmacopoeias of the three United Kingdoms, and to adapt the whole to the existing state of medical knowledge, and to the more thoroug])ly ascertained of the exigencies of medical practice, must inevitably introduce much that is novel and break up or modify much that is old; facilitating, therefore, the simultaneous introduction of every other description of change found to be advisable, and presenting the occasion for moulding the united labour demanded into one effort to be made by the compilers and one lesson to be mastered by the druggist and the practitioner. And this must be especially true of any department so thoroughly pervading the rest as that of the weights and measures. If a change in them be really necessary, that change should be made now, when it will obviously glide easily into use with all the rest. Defer it, however, and the bulk of the recently advanced labour will be proportionately rolled back, to be commenced, anew so soon as the clamour for the removal of defects has become too strong to be disregarded; and then as a task the more ungrateful, that it will be felt that it might have been rationally anticipated and avoided. Such an alternative once determined, and it is that which is really in prospect, it cannot be difficult to discern the part likely to be taken by the eminent men who constitute the Medical Council. All are aware, that the standard originally authorised for phar- maceutical uses in this country, after the period of the constitution of the London College of Physicians, and more particularly at the time of the issue of the first Pharmacopoeia of that body, was that modification of the troy weight, which, from certain peculiarities in its lower sub-divisions, has been especially designated as the apothecaries' weight; and that this was thenceforward appointed to be held as appropriated for exclusive use in medicine, and in the laboratories of the druggists. But there was, probably, even at this early period, an element already at work, which shook the security of the exclusive sanction designed to be thus given to the troy standard ; and this lay in the habit of the wholesale druggists with reference to their sales, which were made to the retailers by the avoirdupois weights. Thus the apothecary was at once placed in the predica- ment of having to purchase most of his wares by one description ol weight, imposed upon him from beyond the profession, and to com- pound, sell, and dispense them by another, which a legitimate authority had enjoined within the profession ; and therefore, in the latter case, with what ought to have been all the influence of a direct and natural claim upon his implicit compliance. The embar- rassment thus occasioned soon led to a partial infringement of w hat had beet) fixed upon as the rule; and this was glided into the more readily, that the universal adoption of the avoirdupois system, by all](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21451941_0004.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
