Abstract
APPLYING the yardstick of the British Pharmacopoeia to its contemporaries, he finds the Spanish Pharmacopoeia of 1930 one of the most satisfying and instructive of the modern pharmacopoeias, although still retaining some aroma of the past by the inclusion of castoreum and musk. The Swiss Pharmacopoeia of 1933 is an excellent production pharmaceutically, although omitting modern methods of biological testing, through the absence of a public laboratory for performing these tests in Switzerland, comparable with that of the Pharmaceutical Society in Great Britain. The utility of the Yugoslavian Pharmacopoeia, 1934, is limited by its being printed in Slavonian, a difficulty which the Hungarian Pharmacopoeia, 1934, overcomes by the use of Latin, the scientific lingua franca of two hundred years ago and still current, though in a bastard form, where physicians and pharmacists work together. The language problem is one only of those disclosed by an examination of eight of the most modern of the European pharmacopoeias, and the conclusion to which Mr. Hampshire is drawn is that the steps taken by International Conferences in 1902 and 1925 towards the international unification of the formulae of potent medicaments should be actively followed up, a proposal which the innocent abroad with his prescription will endorse. His further proposal that there should be a permanent body charged with this duty is probably less likely to be welcomed by a generation grown sceptical of the activities of international committees and disinclined to put its hand in its pocket for the maintenance of yet another.
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Modern Pharmacop"ias. Nature 134, 133 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134133c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134133c0