A Respectable Occupation: - University of Hertfordshire Research ...

arrangement considering that the pharmacy qualification in the colonies
had been based on the British syllabus and that some of the colonies were
accepted as having achieved a high standard in pharmaceutical education.
In making the arrangement, the Society believed that it would be dealing
with pharmacists whose skill and knowledge was similar to that of those
who had qualified in Britain. 134
At a later date, the government included the army dispensers and
apothecaries‘ assistants in this provision, to nullify opposition to the Bill
and ensure its being passed into law. This opposition was proposing an
amendment that would have opened the Pharmaceutical Society‘s register
to all apothecaries‘ assistants. 135 While including the army dispensers and
apothecaries‘ assistants in Section 4(b) as a compromise, the government
overlooked, or because of expediency ignored, one important issue. Neither
the army dispensers, nor the apothecaries‘ assistants had a training or
qualification, either in scope or complexity, approaching the colonial
dispensers with whom they were being associated.
Additionally, the Society had included the colonial dispensers with no
opposition in Parliament, so the decision to register them or not was entirely
their own. This was not true in the case of the apothecaries‘ assistants;
because they had been included to negate opposition to the Bill, there was a
view that they had become a fundamental feature of the Act. Section 4(b)
that the Pharmaceutical Society thought it was accepting on the basis that
it would be permissive, had become obligatory. Pressure had been applied
134 „Reciprocity with the Colonies‟, Pharmaceutical Journal, series 4, 87, 33, (4 Nov. 1911) 587-588.
135 „The Proposed New Bye-law in Relation to Apothecaries‟ Assistants‟, Pharmaceutical Journal, 102,
2901, (24 May 1919) 323-324.
333