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

development. They had parliamentary agents and surely, with the number
of times they had been surprised previously, one would have thought that
they would, by now, be paying special attention.
In May of the same year, the Senior Warden presented evidence on
behalf of the assistants before a committee appointed by the Home
Secretary to consider outstanding objections to the Dangerous Drugs Act. 184
The committee recommended that hospitals and institutions that had
employed assistants as dispensers for a period of three years should be
exempted from the provisions of the Act, yet the Home Secretary ignored the
recommendation. 185 The Clerk wrote to the Home Secretary in October in
protest and a month later met with Mr Anderson, the Secretary to the
Committee. Mr Anderson‘s response was that its recommendation that
institutions employing appropriate assistants should be exempted, had not
been ignored by the Home Secretary, as the order he had made was not final
and the Institutions should apply for exemption. 186 This was the back door
route, whereby the assistant could not obtain authority to order and handle
these substances, but the institution employing him or her could. In some
cases they did, but no doubt in others they decided that they would be better
off employing a pharmacist, either immediately, or when the position next
became vacant.
The pharmacists were always on the look out for an opportunity to
increase their control of the dispensing business, as this example in a letter
184
Society of Apothecaries Archive, Court Minute Book 1913-1926, Court of Assistants Minutes, 5 Apr.
1921.
185
Society of Apothecaries Archive, Court Minute Book 1913-1926, Court of Assistants Minutes, 4 Oct.
1921.
186
Society of Apothecaries Archive, Court Minute Book 1913-1926, Private Court Minutes, 1 Nov. 1921.
352