Pharmacy: an illustrated history [antikvár]

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTSPharmacy is a profession with ancient antecedents, and its development in a particular society, like that of any other human institution, reflects the extent to which that society has been able to adjust to its environment through its religion, its science, its technology, and its social organization. Pharmacy did not develop in vacuo: its status and its progress in a given society depended upon the time, the people, and the cultural level of that people. The primitive concept of animism, the rationality of the classical Greeks, the spirituality of the medieval monastery, the beauty of Renaissance art, the excitement of discovery and exploration, the wondrous burgeoning of science and technology in the nineteenth century, the mind-boggling advances in high technology and genetic engineering of our own time, alland morehave a place in the history of pharmacy and in the shaping of its character.Pharmacy evolved into a specialized health profession, which, shorn of the commercial aspects sometimes visible in the pharmacy shop, has as its raison d'etre the provision of medications. Pharmacy can be defined on three levels. First, pharmacy performs the functions of procurement, preservation, preparation, compounding, and dispensing of drugs in appropriate dosage forms. Historically, it will be seen, these activities were performed by a variety of functionaries; not until all were performed by a single practitioner in a separate establishment can there be said to have been a "pharmacist" and a "pharmacy shop." Except for the preparation and compounding of medicines, which are now almost entirely in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry, these activities are still the responsibility of the pharmacist. Pharmacy, on this level, is not only the sum of these activities and functions; it also includes the institutional, legal, and ethical bases on which these functions are carried out in the service of society.Bronze mortar and pestle on a carved wooden pedestal, a decoration from a Swiss-Germanpharmacy. 1686. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.The second level on which pharmacy is to be defined is that of materia medica, or, perhaps better here, materia pharmaceu-tica. Pharmacy in this sense is the body of knowledge of drugs and medicinestheir identification, their properties, their actions. Based historically on botany and chemistry, this scientific concept of pharmacy now also embraces the sciences of pharmacology and pharmacognosy and is concerned with such relatively new subsciences as pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics.On the third level, pharmacy applies a body of experimental science to improve and develop medications. Whereas pharmacy as a profession depends on science to assure safe and effective medications and to make it possible to understand how they work, pharmacy as experimental science proceeds from that point toward a creative role. On this level, pharmacy contributes to sciences and technologies that have become to a great extent the responsibility of the large enterprise: the university laboratory, the government agency, the pharmaceutical industry.The history that unfolds in the following pages deals with pharmacy on each of these levels. In the process, it casts light on the importance of pharmacy to the public weal, on how contemporary pharmaceutical institutions became what they are, and on the future prospects of pharmacy. For centuries, pharmacy was a relatively static profession, but it has become a changing and dynamic force in the delivery of health care.We must first of all acknowledge an immeasurable debt to Dr. Glenn Sonnedecker, Dr. Edward Kremers (1865-1941), and Dr. George Urdang (1882-1960). Without the seminal and comprehensive fourth edition of Kremers and Urdang's History of Pharmacy, which Dr. Sonnedecker edited and augmented, this work would have proved an endless task.Dr. Sonnedecker has read the manuscript and given us the benefit of his knowledge and ability. Our work has profited