Abstract
WE referred last week to the special measures proposed by Sir Mackenzie Chalmers's Committee for the control of the quality and authenticity of vaccines, toxins, antitoxins, salvarsan, and certain other drugs. What is there in the special circumstances of our time to justify a closer superintendence of the many new therapeutic substances now in common medical use? It might well have been supposed that in the vast technical developments of the last half century “big business” had, through the sheer excellence of its scientific methods, reached a plane where further public control was superfluous. Over a large area of the drug field this is true. If we look back for half a century we can trace, since the medical Acts, a steady growth in the technical standardisation of all the drugs used in medicine. The British Pharmacopoeia itself came into existence because, experimental pharmacology showed the need for precision of dosage and the consequent standardisation of drugs. The demand made by scientific medicine evoked the best powers of scientific chemistry. To-day there are few fields of applied science that can show greater precision of practice than the drugs now used as therapeutic substances. Standardisation, therefore, and control in one degree or another are accepted methods of securing the consumer not-merely against fraud but also against inertness and inefficiency in chemical medicines.
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Standardisation of Vaccines, Toxins, and Antitoxins. Nature 107, 161–162 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/107161a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/107161a0