Article September 28, 1907 Issue

Dr. J. N. Hurty, secretary of the Indiana Board of...

Pharmaceutical Era

Dr. J. N. Hurty, secretary of the Indiana Board of Health, delivered an interesting address before the State Pharmaceutical Association recently, and some of his thoughts will bear reproduction:—

"Pharmacy, chemistry, and much of materia medica were evolved from alchemy. Alchemy started in the brilliant but absolutely unsupported idea of the possibility of transmuting base metals into gold. In a thousand years of futile endeavor to make gold the alchemists uncovered a mountain of valuable chemical and physical facts. Finally, the alchemist realized he had been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp, and so he again conjured up out of nothing, a second pill. This time he had the idea that he could make or find a medicine which would prolong life indefinitely. A thousand years was spent in this search, and the period iatro-chemistry, as it was called, passed without its hopes being realized in the slightest degree.

"For another thousand years we have been searching for medicines to cure disease, and now, as in the other experiences, we see the futility of the search. Knowledge comes painfully and slowly. 'It takes a thousand years,' said Professor Fish, 'to raise the human family a single notch.' If we finally conclude, and we certainly shall, that medicine for the cure of disease is a pure fetish, what will become of the drug-store and of the drug-curing doctor? Obviously they will pass. They are passing now. The drug-store of to-day and the physician of to-day bear little resemblance to those of twenty years ago. I remember when tinctures were prescribed by the quart and we made them in five-gallon lots. Now, a pint of tincture in the ordinary store is the stock, and lasts a year. The city drug-store has changed more than the country store. The front of the modern drug store room is filled with sundries. A magnificent marble or onyx soda fountain and cases of cigars and tobacco, and other cases of stationery and cut glass first appear. and way back, almost out of sight, loom the ancient prescription case and the drug bottles."

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September 28, 1907
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