Medical reform : a letter to the Right Hon. Viscount Melbourne with the outlines of a Bill for regulating the practice of surgeon-apothecaries and chemists and druggists ... and a plan for suppressing uneducated practitioners ... / by Martin Sinclair.

Date:
[1840?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical reform : a letter to the Right Hon. Viscount Melbourne with the outlines of a Bill for regulating the practice of surgeon-apothecaries and chemists and druggists ... and a plan for suppressing uneducated practitioners ... / by Martin Sinclair. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    4/36 (page 4)
    England in consequence of tlie construction that has been put upon the Apothecaries’ Act of 1815; and when we see on the other hand persons carrying on the business of Chemist and Druggist without being required to pursue any pre- scribed course of preliminary or professional education ; when we see Druggists vending and compounding the most powerful and dangerous remedial agents without the least knowledge of their quality; and when we see, by a recent decision of a court of law, that Druggists are by the provisions of the same statute authorised to visit and prescribe for the sick, without having received any medical qualification whatever,—surely this anomalous state of the law calls loudly for reform; and when we advert to the deaths, as testified by coroners’ inquests, which are occasioned by the practices of quackery and empiricism, surely the health of the Community is a subject demanding the attention of the paternal government of a civilized nation, and it is to be hoped that any measure calculated to remedy these evils will receive the support of your Lordship’s administration. Having given considerable attention to the question of Medical Reform, since the subject was mooted in the year 1832, I have taken the liberty of bringing under your Lordship’s notice the Outlines of a Bill which I humbly submit would go far to remove the grievances of which the Profession has to complain, without making any changes in the constitution of the existing Medical Corporations; and when that Bill or some corres- ponding measure has passed into a Law, the question of the formation of a National Faculty of Medicine may be then entertained—at present I conceive the subject is premature, and however plausible the subject may appear in theory, the legal difficulties with which the question is invested and the conflicting interests of the different parties will throw obsta- cles in the way of carrying the project into practice ; and as those obstacles will not be removed so easily as may be imagined, the subject, therefore, deserves the most deliberate consideration and mature judgment. As this view of the question will appear to many warm and zealous reformers as an insufficient amendment of the laws that regulate the Medical Profession, I hope your Lordship will permit me to bring the question fairly under consideration, how far the grievances of the Profession may he remedied by the present Bill, or how far the creation of a Faculty of Medicine, as contemplated by Mr. Warburton, by Mr. Hawes, and by the British Medical Asso- ciation, in their respective Bills, is necessary for accomplishing