Medical patents : a letter on the patenting of inventions in connexion with medicine / by John Chapman.

  • John Chapman
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical patents : a letter on the patenting of inventions in connexion with medicine / by John Chapman. 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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    compouud and sell such medicines: the only legal privilege a dealer in them can now obtain is that of labelling his articles with any peculiar trade mark which he may choose to adopt. The imitation by a rival of such a trade label, the legal character of which is identical with that of the labels on Bass’s beer bottles, the law holds to be a species of forgery and punishes it as such. Thus a right appreciation of the claims of medical science and a due regard for the public welfare have conjointly necessitated professional repudiation of men who deal in secretly compounded or quack-medicines, as well as earnest reprobation of the custom, so long as it was continued, of protecting such medicines by royal letters-patent. It is not to be won- dered at, therefore, that, influenced by the law of mental association, the great body of medical men, who feel a wholesome horror of patent medi- cines and of the whole system of secret nostrums, should confound with them, and feel the like horror towards every remedial agent to which the word patent is attached. Hence, as you observe, “ the patenting of inven- tions in connexion with medicine is not in accordance with the principles generally approved by the profession.” But, sir, I venture to predict that this indiscriminate condemnation of all patents in connexion with medicine will be reversed, and that the medical profession, in order to justify and maintain the “ principles” which animate it in reprobating patent medicines and the whole system of secret nostrums, will be obliged to appeal to the only true standard of right and wrong—the great doctrine of utility, expounded with pre-eminent cogency and clearness by John Stuart Mill. Guided by that doctrine, I have shown above what is the true basis of the “ principles” in question—viz., the well- established conviction that the vending of medicines, the composition of which is kept secret, and the granting of letters-patent empowering the exclusive manufacture and sale of such medicines, are impediments to the progress of medical science and injurious to the public at large. But the same cannot be said of the grant of an exclusive privilege, for a term of years, of making and vending a surgical instrument, or any mechanical apparatus 1'or a medical purpose. This privilege involves no secresy : any one can make medical or surgical apparatuses for accomplishing the same purposes as those for which the patented articles are designed; the mode of their construction is not and cannot be concealed ; and all the privilege the patent confers is that of an exclusive right for a term of years of making the patented article. It is objected that no medical man ought to have a pecuniary interest in anything he recommends, for, if he has, he is likely to recommend it in cases when it may not conduce to the welfare of his patients, and may even prove injurious. In support of this objection it is urged—(1) that medical practitioners who supply from their own dispensaries, and charge for, the drugs which they prescribe, are often tempted to dose their patients with medicines which they would be quite as well, and perhaps better, without; (2) that alienist-physicians who themselves possess houses for the residence of the insane, may be induced to recommend the seclusion of patients in those houses in cases in which seclusion is unnecessary, and even cruel; (3) that if, for example, the Director-General of the Army Medical Department were to invent and patent a portable bed alleged by
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