The old Northwest territory and pharmaceutical education / [Edward Kremers].

  • Kremers, Edward, 1865-1941.
Date:
1934
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The old Northwest territory and pharmaceutical education / [Edward Kremers]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ^r THE OLD NORTHWEST TERRITORY AND PHARMACEUTICAL EDUCATION Dr. Edward Kremers —;- i Every school child has learned of the Edict of 1787 and, no doubt, has been told by his history teacher that this act of Congress laid the foundation for the constitutions of the five states to be carved, in due season, out of the “Northwest Territory.” He may have learned, not only that the future states were to be free states so far as slavery was concerned, but also that provision had been made for the educa¬ tional systems of these states, even to a state university as the culmina¬ tion of the popular education of generations as yet unborn. However, it is doubtful if even the writers of textbooks of the history of these United States have been, or are today, aware of the fact that these same embryonic universities were to revolutionize pharmaceutical edu¬ cation in this country. My designation of the change referred to as revolutionary is not prompted by a desire to produce a striking effect in the minds of those listening to this discourse. That it was truly revolu¬ tionary is revealed by the argumentative battles fought by the repre¬ sentatives of the old and the new ideals of pharmaceutical education. In his Japhet in Search of a Father Marryat tells us that, when the apprentices of rival chemists’ shops met in the streets of London, “draughts . . . met draughts in their passage through the circum¬ ambient air, and exploded like shells over a besieged town. Boluses were fired with the precision of cannon shot, pill boxes were thrown with such force that they burst like grape and canister, while acids and alkalies hissed, as they neutralized each other’s power, with all the venom of expiring snakes.” It need scarcely be said that this vivid description, born in the imagination of an English novelist, must not be taken literally so far as rival educators are concerned any more than it applied to London apprentices. As a figure of speech, however, it paints a picture of the feeling which prevailed. For a thirty years’ war resulted when the first of the five state universities of the Old Northwest had the temerity