The Milroy Lectures on international coöperation in public health, its achievements and prospects : delivered before the Royal College of Physicians on Feb. 27th and March 1st, 1934 / by George S. Buchanan.

  • George Seaton Buchanan
Date:
[1934]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Milroy Lectures on international coöperation in public health, its achievements and prospects : delivered before the Royal College of Physicians on Feb. 27th and March 1st, 1934 / by George S. Buchanan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    a definite service to medicine, and then go on to other matters in which the League has found advantage in using medical and public health knowledge to further its own objects of promoting fellowship between nations. BIOLOGICAL STANDARDS COMMISSION Our Therapeutic Substances Act is as recent as 1925, and it was only when that Act, and the regu- lations made under it, came into operation that we were in a position to exercise effective control over the purity of potency of therapeutic substances which cannot adequately be tested by chemical means. We now accept this control, both for the home product and for products coming from overseas, as part of the natural order of things, and are familiar with the exact and scientific methods by which the regu- lations have been prepared and are enforced through the National Institute for Medical Eesearch and the central public health departments. But the part played by the international conferences on these questions can hardly be over-estimated. Some years before the enactment of our own legislation it had been evident that the difficulties which we were encountering were also weighing heavily on other countries. The uncertainties about the measure of potency of antitoxic sera, notably those for diphtheria and tetanus, received immediate attention after the war ; as also did the need for a better understanding of the tests to be applied to salvarsan and analogous substances. National difficulties in deciding on the admission of these remedies from foreign laboratories and doubts about the sufficiency and efficiency of purely national methods of control, found expression at the Paris Office in 1919 and 1920. It then became clear that it was only by the close association of expert workers in the principal laboratories con- cerned that any satisfactory agreement could be arrived at either as to tests to be applied or as to the standard substances which should be maintained in particular laboratories for international reference. Here it was at once reahsed was a promising ground for the new International Health Organisation of the League, which had sufficient funds at its disposal to organise the necessary conferences and coordinate work in different laboratories. The first trial of this method, especially in relation to the antitoxins I
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