World Pharmacy Day
Posted in: Days to Remember 3rd August 2022
World Pharmacy Day. 25th September 2022.
The forthcoming World Pharmacy Day is a special day for all Pharmacists around the world, and to celebrate, we feel it’s time to reflect on the important role they play from the eye of the general public. I wanted to share an insight with you here – I promise an interesting read …
It’s easy in the modern 21st century to take things for granted.
I never once wake up and feel thankful for electricity, for example. I feel the same about my smart-phone and my opposable thumbs, never stopping to think just how useful they are and what life would be like if they weren’t there.
But as we approach the (relatively) newly created ‘World Pharmacy Day’ maybe we should stop to reflect on the enormous role that this maligned and never-thought about institution (until we need it) plays in our lives, namely, the chemist shop.
We rarely use the term ‘pharmacy’ in the UK do we? So I’ll call them chemists for the purposes of this blog (though there’s a distinct trend from ‘chemist’ to ‘pharmacy’ these days, I do confess).
Maybe one of the reasons we take chemists for granted is that they’re always there – in the UK you’re never far from one and you’re probably not far from one that’s open throughout the night, either. If you go abroad you’ll note the location of your hotel and you’ll also keep in mind where the nearest chemist is too – we like them close-by and omnipresent, they’re in super-markets, airports, shopping centres, high streets, quite often next door to your GP and of course, online.
It’s hard to pin-point the birth of ‘the chemist’ (I’ve been trying to do the hard work for you). I was hoping to do a simple Google enquiry only to find a smart building in London with a blue plaque stating ‘on this site stood the world’s first chemist shop which opened for business on 31st March 1872’ but, alas, it doesn’t exist (I had imagined this blog looking rather neat with a high def picture of the plaque below it). The fact is though, our desire to cure the sick and relieve suffering is as old as humanity itself. A hundred thousand years ago there would have been weird and wonderful concoctions to ‘cure’ the sick and a place where you could go and get them (I am sure that, for the vast majority of treatments, any ‘curing’ was purely coincidental).
Scientists have even managed to identify an early ‘prescription’ chiselled into a clay tablet (carbon-dated to around 4,000 years ago, it instructs the bearer on the correct application of bat droppings in conjunction with hair retrieved from the stomach of a cow, the exact ailment that it was supposed to be treating was, mercifully, never established).
Its origins are all rather unsatisfying, but if you really need a date, let’s go for 1852. From that point onwards, the Pharmacy Act 1852 meant that only people who were registered with the government and who were members of the Pharmaceutical Society could call themselves, and trade as, pharmacists. A further act of parliament in 1868 controlled the sale of poisons and opium (controlled as opposed to banned it should be noted – the sale of opium would still be legal in certain forms 52 years later until the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 outlawed them. (Laudanum, an alcoholic solution containing morphine (prepared from opium) was a huge money spinner for druggist stores, they weren’t going to give that up without a fight.)
These two acts of parliament set the scene for the chemists that we have today. Suddenly it was a regulated industry, you had to know what you were doing, you needed to be qualified and there were lots of things you couldn’t sell – and the effects were huge. Under-five child deaths halved in the three years following the 1868 act, and halved again within the following 10 years. The wider effects on society as a whole were huge, add to this advances in medicine, the formation of the NHS and numerous improvements to legislation, then you get the world-class chemists that you see today in our hospitals and on our high streets, a pharmaceutical industry in the UK which employs 63,000 people who care for us all through their diligent work and their highest of standards.
Reading legislation which was drafted in the first half of the eighteenth century, by the way, would horrify modern readers. The drafters of legislation would go out of their way to ensure that women did not have access to most professions for which legislation was necessary, but the 1868 Pharmacy Act was different. They neglected to restrict women and as a result, 223 women were listed on the first compulsory register of pharmacists in 1869. It was a major moment of equality for women’s rights in the middle of the Victorian era, an era not known for its commitment to equality. (No one seems quite sure if this was intentional, some are of the opinion that the draftsmen of the day (and they would have been men) simply made an error and accidentally forgot to restrict the profession to men only.
It was proposed by the International Pharmaceutical Federation in 2009 that pharmacists should have their day, and quite right too. They chose the date of its 1912 founding as it was the only date that would unite all members, a date guaranteed to gain agreement. The humble chemist shop has evolved over tens of thousands of years and it’s now unconscionable to even consider life without it.
September 25th is now internationally recognised as World Pharmacy Day, a day for us to (very briefly) stop and give thanks that we live in a time and place where the necessary ingredients to sustain health, well-being and ultimately life, are within easy reach, and we really shouldn’t take that for granted.
