Would Scotland have been better off with its own pharmaceutical
society?
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Sydney Holloway: direction of
pharmacy in Scotland changed forever in 1852
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Pharmacists in Scotland may have been better off with
their own Society, according to the author of the Society's official history.
Social historian Sydney Holloway (former senior
lecturer in the faculty of social sciences at the University of Leicester)
was speaking on 15 November at a meeting entitled "Pharmacy in Scotland
1851–1901", held as part of the programme of events celebrating the sesquicentenary
of the Society's presence in Scotland, and jointly organised by the Society's
Scottish Department and the British Society for the History of Pharmacy.
Mr Holloway is well known to pharmacists as the author of 'Royal Pharmaceutical
Society of Great Britain 1841–1991: a political and social history', which
was published in 1991 to celebrate the Society's 150th anniversary.
Mr Holloway explained that pharmacy had developed
differently in Scotland's two main cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Edinburgh's
middle class patients preferred to keep medicine and pharmacy separate,
while the poorer working people of Glasgow were more used to visiting
medically owned establishments for both treatment and drugs.
In 1851 a Parliamentary Private Member's Bill was
sponsored at Westminster by Jacob Bell (one of the Society's founders,
who had been elected to Parliament in the previous year). The Bill sought
"to regulate the qualifications of pharmaceutical chemists and for other
purposes in connection with the practice of pharmacy".
A meeting was convened in Princes Street, Edinburgh,
by manufacturing chemists J. Duncan and W. Macfarlan, and Henry C. Baildon,
a founder member of the North British Branch of the Society, to discuss
the Bill. The meeting decided to promote membership of the Pharmaceutical
Society of Great Britain rather than to form a separate body. It did so
despite Scottish pharmacy's higher educational and professional standards
and its closer association with medical practice, and despite the tradition
of relative autonomy enjoyed by Scotland.
Jacob Bell's Bill became law in 1852 and granted
Scotland a separate board of examiners for pharmacy. It did much to swell
the ranks of the Society's North British Branch, said Mr Holloway, but
the exclusion of Scotland's doctor-druggists changed the direction of
the profession in Scotland forever.
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