The American Medical Association and the United States pharmacopoeia / a reprint of the pamphlets of H.C. Wood, Alfred B. Taylor, the Philadelphia County Medical Society, and the National College of Pharmacy ; with a rejoinder addressed to the professions of medicine and pharmacy of the United States, by Edward R. Squibb.

  • E. R. Squibb
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The American Medical Association and the United States pharmacopoeia / a reprint of the pamphlets of H.C. Wood, Alfred B. Taylor, the Philadelphia County Medical Society, and the National College of Pharmacy ; with a rejoinder addressed to the professions of medicine and pharmacy of the United States, by Edward R. Squibb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    changes in the nature of the Pharmacopoeia, the mode of its preparation, and its relations may be made by the convention, of which it is a scandal to state that its members are in the interests of any one or can be improperly controlled by any person or persons. The fact is that the assertion and the objection of Dr. Squibb rest upon a misunderstanding so groundless as to be remarkable, and so full of reflections upbn those to whom the profession has yielded deference for forty years that it is monstrous. The copyright of the Pharmacopceia'is held by the chairman of the Commit- tee of Revision, and is not owned by either the authors or the publishers of the United States Dispensatory. The Pharmacopeia is printed and distributed by agreement through J. B. Lippincott & Co., and probably any separate issue of it, without authority, would be resisted by the Committee of Revision. It partakes, however, of the nature of a public document; it is written for comment, and it is not probable that any court would justify the copyright as preventing such quotation as may be necessary for that comment. Such enforcement of the copyright would be an injustice, and would inevitably lead, as it ought, to a revolt against the authority of the Pharmacopoeia. The authors of the United States Dispensatory have never controlled or attempted to control for their own advantage the copyright of the Pharmacopoeia. Assuming the right of quota- tion, they have quoted whatever they deemed necessary for their purpose. In this they have done no more than what has been the practice of almost every American or English writer upon Materia Medica or Therapeutics. If Dr. Squibb, or any other man or association of men, aspire to replace the old United States Dispensatory, the field is an open one. The supremacy of the book can only be maintained in the future as it has been in the past, by its supreme adaptation to the wants of the professions of Pharmacy and Medicine. A second objection of Dr. Squibb is that no money is provided to pay for labor upon the Phai-macopoeia, and that unpaid labor cannot cope with the diffi- culties of the task. Dr. Squibb appears to think that there has been no money for the purpose (p. 9 Squibb's pamphlet) because it [the Pharmacopoeia] was always given arbitrarily to one publishing house. All this, again, is extrinsic to the matter in hand. Such difficulties can as well be met through the National Convention as through The American Medical Association. More than this, the objection rests upon a misunderstanding. The assertion (p. 13 Squibb's pam- phlet) '' that the basis of the plan is voluntary labor throughout is a mistake. The statement that the copyright was given arbitrarily to one publisher is either puerile or a personal reflection upon the Committee of 1860, to which the allusion especially refers, and to a less extent upon other Committees. The Committee of 1860 was composed of Drs. Geo. B. Wood, Franklin Bache, Edward R. Squibb, Henry T. Cummings, Joseph Carson, and Messrs. Chae. T. Carney, Wm. Proctor, Jr., Wm. S. Thompson, and Alfred B. Taylor. The statement alluded to can mean only one of two things, either that the majority of these men, who decided against Dr. Squibb, did not agree with him as to who were the best publishers for the interests of the profession, or else that for per- sonal advantage or other equally improper motive they betrayed their trust and used their position to place the book where they knew it would not do the most good for the cause. The facts are that the Pharmacopoeia of 1860 was issued at the time of the greatest inflation during the war, when the cost of material and labor was at its highest, and the Committee thought it more for the good of the country to bind the publishers to sell the book at the retail rate of one dollar