Offering a valuable resource for medical and other historians, this book
explores the processes by which pharmacy in Britain and its colonies
separated from medicine and made the transition from trade to profession
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
When the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain was founded in 1841,
its founders considered pharmacy to be a branch of medicine. However,
the 1852 Pharmacy Act made the exclusion of pharmacists from the medical
profession inevitable, and in 1864 the General Medical Council decided
that pharmacy legislation was best left to pharmacists themselves. Yet
across the Empire, pharmacy struggled to establish itself as an
autonomous profession, with doctors in many colonies reluctant to
surrender control over pharmacy. In this book the author traces the
professionalization of pharmacy by exploring issues including collective
action by pharmacists, the role of the state, the passage of
legislation, the extension of education, and its separation from
medicine.
The author considers the extent to which the British model of pharmacy
shaped pharmacy in the Empire, exploring the situation in the Divisions
of Empire where the 1914 British Pharmacopoeia applied: Canada, the
West Indies, the Mediterranean colonies, the colonies in West and South
Africa, India and the Eastern colonies, Australia, New Zealand, and the
Western Pacific Islands. This insightful and wide-ranging book offers a
unique history of British pharmaceutical policy and practice within the
colonial world, and provides a firm foundation for further studies in
this under-researched aspect of the history of medicine.
