Abstract
IN these circumstances it was peculiarly fitting that the chairmanship of the annual meeting of the British Pharmaceutical Conference at Aberdeen should have fallen this year to Mr. Herbert Skinner, the veteran pharmacist of the Great Northern Hospital and a former president of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. In his opening address, Mr. Skinner deplored the tendency, which exists even among medical men, to regard the hospital pharmacist as merely a dispenser of medicines, and out of his own rich experience drew an interesting picture of the duties and responsibilities attached to such a position, in the course of which he insisted on the necessity of maintaining a laboratory in every pharmacy, if the pharmacist is not to lapse into a mere distributor. The number of papers contributed to the Science Section of the Conference was twenty-nine, which is stated to be a record. It is perhaps to be expected in a year which sees the advent of a new “Pharmacopœia” that these papers should be largely concerned with methods of analysis of drugs. The importance of this kind of work is obvious, since upon it depends control of the purity and strength of drugs, but it is to be hoped that at future Conferences there will be more papers of the type contributed by Dr. Linnell and his colleagues on the synthesis of pressor substances and local anæsthetics, since these imply the development of interest in the synthesis of new drugs in Great Britain.
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British Pharmaceutical Conference. Nature 130, 468 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130468b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130468b0