Abstract
THE tenth International Congress of Pharmacy was held in Brussels on September i to 6, and was attended by over five hundred pharmacists. The Governments which sent official representatives were those of France, Italy, Spain, Russia, the United States, Norway, Denmark,.Sweden, Holland, Greece, Hungary, China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Venezuela, the Argentine Republic, the Republic of San Salvadore, Guatemala, Haiti, and Chili. The delegates from the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain were Mr. Edmund White, a member of the society's council, and Mr. E. S. Peck, one of the permanent hon. secretaries of the British Pharmaceutical Conference. The most important subject which came up for consideration related to analytical methods. The international conference for the unification of the formulas of potent drugs, held at Brussels in 1902, defined standards for a number of drugs and galenical preparations, but different methods of standardisation give different results, and it was one of the objects of the pharmaceutical congress to consider what steps could be taken to bring about the approximation of analytical methods. After a long discussion it was unanimously resolved, on the motion of Prof. Bourquelot, representing the French Government, to ask the Belgian Government to convene an interational conference, composed largely of practising pharmacists, for the purpose of unifying the methods of estimating potent drugs, with the recommendation that, for the estimation of alkaloidal preparations, preference should be given to gravimetric methods. The congress also agreed that it was desirable that pharmacopoeias should indicate the precise methods of determining physical constants, and that in the case of chemical tests the reactions should not be capable of giving rise to any difference of interpretation. The related topic of the international unification of analytical reagents also received consideration, and the congress resolved to request pharmacopoeia? commissions to adopt as far as possible normal reagents or some multiple of the normal. The decisions on these two questions constitute the most useful part of the work of the congress.
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International Congress of Pharmacy . Nature 84, 354–355 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084354a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084354a0