The prescription : therapeutically, pharmaceutically, and grammatically considered / by Otto A. Wall.

  • Otto Augustus Wall
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prescription : therapeutically, pharmaceutically, and grammatically considered / by Otto A. Wall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    without any scientific preliminary training. A universal language of science is a necessity, and, as Latin is a dead language, fixed in its rules, and not subjected to the changes necessarily incurred by liv- ing languages to accommodate themselves to new conditions of liv- ing, and especially as it is understood more or less perfectly by the educated in all countries, this is the best language for the nomen- clatures of the sciences and arts. Being the source from which so many of our English words were derived, it is also a very simple and easy language to learn, and, as was remarked before, every one who intends to study medicine or pharmacy should study Latin as an in- dispensable preliminary. The ignorance of Latin often shown in the prescriptions in some of the works of American writers on medi- cal subjects, renders American medical education a by-word among the nations, and makes each earnest friend of our country and our profession long for the day when the real worth of our physicians will no longer be hidden under the bushel measure of philological igno- rance. Familiarity with the nomenclature of our drugs and chemicals, and the construction of the names of galenical preparations in Latin, and a knowledge of at least the declensions, is necessary to be able prop- erly to read a prescription. It is true, a prescription may be written correctly by abbreviating the names of its ingredients according to certain simple rules not necessarily requiring a knowledge of Latin, but requiring a memorizing of the official names of drugs and prepara- tions. Or the physician may use these names in his prescriptions without modification on account of case, when his prescriptions will perhaps not be grammatically correct, but will certainly be intelligible anywhere. Grammatical Construction of Prescriptions. In these pages it will be impossible to give any extended instruc- tion in Latin, but some of the elementary rules regarding the gram- matical construction of the prescription may not be out of place. Let us consider the following: R—Magnesii sulpliatis, ^j. D. S.: Take at once. Cr, literally translated into English: Take Of magnesia's sulphate, ] ounce. Let it be given with the signature: Take at once, I^ (abbreviation for recipe) is the imperative mood of the active verb recipio, cepi, ceptum, 3, to take. It means '* take, and its object is placed in the accusative case in Latin, which is similar to the object-