Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

as the charlatans continued to flout the law. The law was modified on 14 th June
1805 those that had previously been on the market were allowed to stay. As well as
those that had been approved by the medical authorities as long as they were useful
and new. On 18 th August 1810 this was again modified to put a commission in place
to examine the medicines to judge whether they were innocuous efficacious. The 3 rd
May 1850 saw yet a further change The French Academy of Medicine had to
confirm that they conformed with four demands:
They were mentioned in the ‘Codex’ (French Pharmacopoeia).
They were prescribed by a doctor.
Had been published by the Government.
That they had the approval of the Academy of Medicine and the latter had
published details in their bulletin.
If these conditions were not met then they were labelled ‘secret remedies’.
However, it was only when there was a disaster that the law was invoked. By 1926
there were so many ‘secret remedies’ that something further had to done, so a
decree on 13 th July 1926 said that as long as they were labelled on the bottles,
boxes, packets or packaging with the name and dose of each drug as well as the
name and address of the pharmacist then they were legal. This left two problems: It
was not possible to patent medicines in France, so anybody could copy the formula
and secondly since the drug now had the name of its contents on the outside
anybody could read them and guess the patient’s disease, e.g. mercury meant they
had syphilis. The industry synthesised more and more drugs and they were able to
patent their mode of manufacture. The pharmacists could now benefit by selling
these new drugs made by the industry (Debue-Barazer, 2003).
In Britain the BMA published two books: the first of 195 pages in 1909 entitled
‘Secret Remedies What they cost and what they contain’ and the second in 1912
‘More Secret Remedies’. These books listed all the medicines and the results of
chemical analysis and pricing of their constituents. Needless to say most of the
ingredients were in low doses, often without efficacy and worth only pence. The
Pharmacy and Medicines Act 1941 made the disclosure of the active ingredients
obligatory.
Adverse Reaction Committees
From c2500 BC Emperors and Kings were making decrees about the use of drugs
and ordering the compilation of pharmacopoeias. Then eminent physicians such as
Hippocrates (370 BC) and Galen (160 AD) were advising on the adverse effects of
drugs. This was followed by professional bodies making regulations for their
members as to the use of drugs, e.g. in 1271 the faculty of Paris forbade the
prescribing of medicines except by qualified physicians and in 1566 the faculty
forbade the use of antimony. The RSM 1864 report and the McKendrick 1880 report
on chloroform were, however, the first occasions when professional bodies set up