Pharmaceutical history and its sources in the Wellcome Collections. I. The growth of professionalism in nineteenth-century British pharmacy.

WHILE the theme of this article is professionalism in nineteenth-century British pharmacy' its chief purpose is to draw attention to the pharmaceutical and associated collections in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and Library which are of value for studying this topic2. I will be stressing items other than printed books for it is often forgotten that objects and ephemera are as much historical documents as books. Nineteenth-century British pharmacy underwent even more radical changes than pharmacy is undergoing today and shows many contrasting features. Some of these I intend to emphasize not because they offer solutions for today's problems, but because they can help to highlight and define them. These radical changes were largely due to the curious situation which allowed the traditional pharmaceutical practitioners-the apothecaries-to become general medical practitioners who took less and less interest in pharmacy. This transition, which developed in the seventeenth century, was quickened by the 1815 Apothecaries Act. By 1858 it was merely a triumph of commonsense that a new Medical Act, in creating one register of medical practitioners, undermined the distinction between universitytrained physicians (who generally treated the upper-class patient) and the apprenticeship-trained apothecary general practitioner. But this did not mean that pharmacy passed entirely out of the hands of the medical profession for even towards the end of the century there were large numbers of 'dispensing doctors'.8 It is of interest that the Society of Apothecaries did not give up its commercial activities in retail and manufacturing pharmacy until 1922.4* The full story of the nineteenth-century