The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7179 p911-936
22-29 December 2001

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Christmas miscellany summary

Pharmacists as heroes

Plummeting morale, spiralling stress, dwindling course enrolment — who's to blame? Is it ourselves? The Government? Osama bin Laden? Those sainted individuals on the Council (surely not)? Who are the authors of our misfortune? Does the answer lie in the question? Are the authors of our misfortune authors?

Well, try this simple, two-part test.

Name three fictional doctors. I don't suppose it took you very long; I can even guess with some assurance that most of you chose Doctors Finlay, Jekyll and Watson, while the more widely read of you may have chosen Poe's Moreau or Lofting's Doolittle. Others may have observed that I did not stipulate medical doctors and opted for Faustus or Pangloss; yet others may have deserted the novel for the theatre and suggested Shaw's Ridgeon (the one on the horns of a dilemma) or Orton's Rance, or turned to popular music for Feelgood or Love.

Whether you chose these or any others, no one, I think, will dispute that the list is extensive, or that the majority of these doctors are heroes, whether comic, tragic, or romantic. They heal the sick (the medical ones I mean), do battle with the forces of Superstition and Prejudice and labour night and day without so much as a receptionist, for the most part. Positive Role Models for every taste and temperament, in short.

Now for the second part of our test — and I think a few of you have got there already. Name three fictional pharmacists. Take as long as you need.

Finished? If you came up with Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael, I'm afraid I shall have to disallow it since there is a school of thought that holds that apothecaries like him are a type of doctor. The ones I managed to come up with are as follows.

First, there is Dai Jenkins, a minor character in A. J. Cronin's 'The Citadel'. During his brief appearance at the beginning of the tale, he comes across as both cynical (praising the merits of Aqua as an ingredient in his preparations) and dishonest, as can be seen in the following address to the square-jawed, incorruptible doctor:

"You don't have to be in so early, doctor. I can do the repeat mixtures before you come in. Mrs Page had a rubber stamp made with doctor's signature when he was taken bad."

Second, the Compounder (no name, just a job description) in George Orwell's 'Burmese Days'. He doesn't even get a line, just a mention in passing:

The patients took the prescriptions across the yard to the Compounder, who gave them bottles filled with water and various vegetable dyes. The Compounder supported himself largely by the sale of drugs, for the government paid him only twenty-five rupees a month.

Is this sounding anything like good publicity to you so far? On to my final example: De Quincey's druggist from his 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater'. I quote:

It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless: and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. My road homewards lay through Oxford-street; and near 'the stately Pantheon' (as Mr Wordsworth has obligingly called it) I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist, unconscious minister of celestial pleasures! — as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected to look on a Sunday: and, when I asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me as any other man might do: and furthermore, out of my shilling, returned to me what seemed to be a real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer. Nevertheless, in spite of such indications of humanity, he has ever since existed in my mind as the beatific vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself. And it conforms me in this way of considering him, that, when I next came up to London, I sought him near the stately Pantheon, and found him not: and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed he had one) he seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford-street than to have removed in any bodily fashion.

Well, at least the customer was satisfied, albeit for the wrong reasons. the mysterious disappearance was probably due to rationalisation.

Perhaps you managed to come up with other examples. I hope they showed our profession in a more flattering light, though I doubt it.

Taking these three as our guide, we may reasonably conclude that the pharmacist is conceived at best as dull and irrelevant and at worst corrupt and mendacious. So is it any wonder that everyone wants to be a doctor?

Still, now that we have identified the problem, we may turn our attention to a solution: we need a whole new fictional genre, with pharmacists as heroes. To this end, I offer a few possible openings:

It's a cold, hard cruel world out there, so there's gonna be a lot of sick people in it. The way I see it is: the rich see a doctor, the not-so-rich see a nurse and the rest of the schmucks turn up on my doorstep. I got a place on the cheap end of Rodeo Drive, and I've seen 'em all in my time. My story begins with one of them; they all do. The minute she walked into my joint that Saturday afternoon I knew she was trouble ...

Then again, romance always sells:

They were alone. Her eyes spoke before the words could follow;

"How did you know? How could you possibly have known?"

How had he known? He had known from the instant she had walked into the shop and back into his life; with all that it meant for both of them. How could he not have known?

His glance passed for an instant from her to the prescription. still clutched in his hand, then back again. Somehow, he found his voice:

"You ticked the maternity exemption box!"

Or there's the futuristic:

Hal ran his Statsmeter over Bowman and waited for the readings. They were all acceptable.

"The Zyklon B appears to have worked well. I feel I may safely conclude that the virus is at least dormant, if not defunct. However, be sure to complete the course."

"I still want to see a doctor," Bowman replied.

Hal sighed. "I told you," he said, "we're having trouble rebooting him."

Or, in conclusion, something in the classic mode:

"It was the epilepsy that first aroused my suspicions."

"There was no mention of epilepsy."

"There was the curious incident. You see, Watson, our ulcer sufferer was a registered epileptic. Hence the exemption from the prescription charge. Now, cimetidine, your choice of relief, while excellent in many ways, has the unfortunate tendency — does it not? — of interacting with phenytoin, the anticonvulsant most commonly used by epileptics. It was the work of a moment to confirm that the patient was indeed taking phenytoin and in consequence cimetidine was unsuitable. I suggest ranitidine be substituted. One twice daily?"

"Of course, of course. Your powers of deduction never cease to amaze me, Holmes."

"Elementary, Doctor Watson," muttered Holmes to himself as he replaced the handset.