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Remember that advertising campaign a few years back urging you to ‘see
your pharmacist’ for advice on your minor ailments? Neither do most people,
who decided to stick with their doctors. To most members of the general
public, the pharmacist remains a glorified shopkeeper who enters their consciousness
only when they need a prescription filling or the weekend is coming up.

Some pharmacists have attempted to counter this indifference by adopting
an ‘open plan’ system whereby customers can watch them dispense the medicine.
However, as more and more medicines now come ready-made the opportunities
to impress are limited.

On the one occasion that pharmacists really come into their own-calls
to the prescribing doctor querying the choice of treatment-the customer
is kept in ignorance. At such times, the pharmacist must display a wide
range of skills.

These include diplomacy: ‘Are you quite sure about this dose?’ (seeing
as it would kill a carthorse); didacticism: ‘We can’t actually dispense
this now’ (did anybody ever mention the blacklist to you?); and, most important,
deduction: ‘As Mrs X is exempt charges because she’s pregnant, should she
be taking this?’ (No). To say nothing of the cryptographic skills necessary
to decipher the handwriting (not that I am complaining-it is just embarrassing
to have to ask the patient’s name all the time).

If all this were to be carried out within the patients’ earshot the
pharmacist might be better appreciated; unfortunately it is certain that
many of them would go off doctors altogether and go back to abusing themselves
with ancient nostrums. All this wouldn’t be so bad if the doctors monopolised
the blame as well as the credit. Yet scarcely an issue of the Pharmaceutical
Journal goes by without an account of a pharmacist’s censure for failing
to pick up a mistake on a prescription.

So what’s to be done? If the advertising industry cannot improve the
pharmacist’s image, who can? Well, try this. Name three fictional doctors.
No trouble-you probably came up with Finlay and Watson (of Sherlock Holmes’s
fame) without even thinking, then followed by, say, Jekyll. Now try for
three fictional pharmacists. Ellis Peters’s Brother Caedfel doesn’t really
count as an apothecary-they’re half doctor. Apart from that, all I can come
up with is Dai Jenkins, a minor character in A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel,
and the Compounder in George Orwell’s Burmese Days, who doesn’t even get
a word in.

And these are hardly what you’d call sympathetic characters. Consider
Dai Jenkins: ‘You don’t have to be so early, doctor, I can do the repeat
mixtures and the certificates before you come in.’ Mrs Page had a rubber
stamp made with doctor’s signature when he was taken bad.’

Then the Compounder: ‘The patients took the prescriptions across the
yard to the Compounder, who gave them bottles filled with water and various
vegetable dyes. The Compounder supported himself largely by the sale of
drugs, for the government paid him only twenty-five rupees a month.’

Thanks, guys. Perhaps this is what we need to improve our image; positive
pharmaceutical literature. We could have romance (a dispensary is just as
much a separate world as a hospital, if not more so), drama (Ten Green Bottles:
a melodrama in three acts) and, most important, pharmacist detectives. Someone
in the Phillip Marlowe mould perhaps (‘There’s a lot of crazy people out
there and some of them write prescriptions. I get to clean up the mess.’).

Or perhaps we need something in the classical vein:

‘It was the epilepsy that first aroused my suspicions.’

‘There was no mention of epilepsy.’ ‘That was the curious incident.
You see, Watson, our ulcer sufferer was a registered epileptic. Hence the
exemption from prescription charges. Now cimetidine, your choice for relief,
while excellent in many ways has the unfortunate tendency-does it not?-of
interacting with phenytoin, the anticonvulsant most commonly used by epileptics.
It was the work of a moment to confirm that the patient was indeed taking
phenytoin and that in consequence cimetidine was unsuitable. I therefore
suggest that ranitidine be substituted. One twice a day?’

‘Of course, of course. Your powers of deduction never cease to amaze
me, Holmes.’

‘Elementary, Doctor Watson,’ muttered Holmes, as he replaced the receiver.

Ian MacKillop is a hospital pharmacy technician.