Pharmacopoeia
A pharmacopoeia, pharmacopeia, or pharmacopoea (from the obsolete typography pharmacopœia, meaning "drug-making"), in its modern technical sense, is a book containing directions for the identification of compound medicines, and published by the authority of a government or a medical or pharmaceutical society.
Although older writings exist which deal with herbal medicine, the major initial work in the field is considered to be the Edwin Smith Papyrus in Egypt, Pliny's pharmacopoeia.
[citation needed] The Shen-nung pen ts'ao ching (Divine Husbandman's Materia Medica) is the earliest known Chinese pharmacopoeia.
[1] Before 1542, the works principally used by apothecaries were the treatises on simples (basic medicinal ingredients) by Avicenna and Serapion; the De synonymis and Quid pro quo of Simon Januensis; the Liber servitoris of Bulchasim Ben Aberazerim, which described preparations made from plants, animals, and minerals, and was the type of the chemical portion of modern pharmacopoeias; and the Antidotarium of Nicolaus de Salerno, containing Galenic formulations arranged alphabetically.
According to recent research communicated at the congresses of the International Society for the History of Medicine by the scholar Francisco Javier González Echeverría,[14][15][16] Michel De Villeneuve (Michael Servetus) also published a pharmacopoeia.
De Villeneuve, fellow student of Vesalius and the best galenist of Paris according to Johann Winter von Andernach,[17] published the anonymous "Dispensarium or Enquiridion" in 1543, at Lyon, France, with Jean Frellon as editor.
This finding was communicated by the same scholar in the International Society for the History of Medicine,[16][22] with agreement of John M. Riddle, one of the foremost experts on Materia Medica-Dioscorides works.
This was a combined effort to improve public health after an outbreak of the bubonic plague, and also to limit the number of quack apothecary shops in Amsterdam.
[1] At this period the compounds employed in medicine were often heterogeneous mixtures, some of which contained from 20 to 70, or more, ingredients, while a large number of simples were used in consequence of the same substance being supposed to possess different qualities according to the source from which it was derived.
In this issue many of the remedies previously in use were omitted, although a good number were still retained, such as dogs' excrement, earthworms, and moss from the human skull; the botanical names of herbal remedies were for the first time added to the official ones; the simple distilled waters were ordered of a uniform strength; sweetened spirits, cordials and ratafias were omitted as well as several compounds no longer used in London, although still in vogue elsewhere.
A great improvement was effected in the edition published in 1746, in which only those preparations were retained which had received the approval of the majority of the pharmacopoeia committee; to these was added a list of those drugs only which were supposed to be the most efficacious.
[1] In the edition published in 1788 the tendency to simplify was carried out to a much greater extent, and the extremely compound medicines which had formed the principal remedies of physicians for 2,000 years were discarded, while a few powerful drugs which had been considered too dangerous to be included in the Pharmacopoeia of 1765 were restored to their previous position.
This dissatisfaction was probably owing partly to the fact that the majority of the compilers of the work were not engaged in the practice of pharmacy, and therefore not competent to decide upon the kind of preparations required for the method of their manufacture.
In the U.S., the USP-NF (United States Pharmacopeia – National Formulary) has been issued by a private non-profit organization since 1820 under the authority of a Convention that meets periodically that is largely constituted by physicians, pharmacists, and other public health professionals, setting standards published in the compendia through various Expert Committees.
Nonetheless, some progress has been made under the banner of the International Council on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH),[25] a tri-regional organisation that represents the drug regulatory authorities of the European Union, Japan, and the United States.
The rapid increase in knowledge renders necessary frequent new editions, to furnish definite formulae for preparations that have already come into extensive use in medical practice, so as to ensure uniformity of strength, and to give the characters and tests by which their purity and potency may be determined.
In the UK, the task of elaborating a new Pharmacopoeia is entrusted to a body of a purely medical character, and legally the pharmacist does not, contrary to the practice in other countries, have a voice in the matter.
The use of trade synonyms in the Pharmacopoeia, such as saltpetre for purified potassium nitrate, and milk of sulphur for precipitated sulphur, is partly answerable for this difficulty, and has proved to be a mistake, since it affords ground for legal prosecution if a chemist sells a drug of ordinary commercial purity for trade purposes, instead of the purified preparation which is official in the Pharmacopoeia for medicinal use.
[1] Another legal difficulty connected with modern pharmacopoeias is the inclusion in some of them of synthetic chemical remedies, the processes for preparing which have been patented, whilst the substances are sold under trade-mark names.
