Observations on medical weights and measures.

  • Wilson, Charles.
Date:
[1859?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on medical weights and measures. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    themselves into the practice of pharmacy as peculiar to ourselves, owing to the custom in this country of appropriating diiferent species of weights to different commodities: and it advances, in special terms, the statement that already then, as the druggists and grocers sell by the avoirdupois vi^eights, so^ few apothecaries keep weights adjusted to the troy pound greater than two drams, but for all above use averdepois weights; a practice of which it once more enjoins the discontinuance, as leading to mischievous error. The College seems to have even then contemplated the possible advan- tage or necessity of itself passing over to the avoirdupois system, as a politic concession; yet only, apparently, to be startled from this idea upon grounds which it was in its own power to render in- adequate, and to conclude once more by maintaining an exclusive adherence to the troy standard. Those who examine into the spirit of our medical literature, and remark the prevailing conscientiousness by which it is characterised, will not be surprised that men of eminence, not only for special acquaintance with the subject of pharmacy, but for general learning and high character, should not have been slow afterwards in repeat- ing these charges, and in showing their sense of the importance of the malversations to Avhich they pointed. Dr Healde, among the rest, in his translation of the London Pharmacopoeia, published first in 1786, while commenting upon the faults liable to be introduced by the prevaiHng irregularities, laments, as was natural for him at the period, that the avoirdupois weights are not banished entii^ely from the shops of apothecaries. In 1789, Dr Duncan, of Edin- burgh, while editing the Dispensatory of Dr Lewis, complains of the px-evailing differences of weights as having occasioned great con- fusion in the practice of pharmacy. In 1822, on the publication of the tenth edition of the Edinburgh New Dispensatory, his eminent son, Dr Duncan, jun., than whom there was then no higher authority in this department of medicine, and no more conscientious writer and observer, renews the challenge of the want of uniformity of weights and measures as attended with many inconveniences, and charges it, besides, with its fitness for engendering numerous and culpable errors. Dr Christison, with a like title to attention, in his Dispen- satory published in 1842, brings a similar accusation against the cur- rent system. Many druggists and apothecaries have themselves had candour enough to admit, as their own experience, that the irregu- larities introduced had proved to them a continually recurring source of confusion and inconvenience, and had added a perpetual excuse or occasion for carelessness in young dispensers. Nor, independently of a more general reprobation, are these regrets and confessions, the instances of which might have been multiplied indefinitely from withm the di^^erent departments of the profession, unattended with somethmg like the taunts of others beyond its limits. The Parha- ^ Plan of a New London Pharmacopceia, 1745, p. xxxii.