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Offering a valuable resource for medical and other historians, this book explores the processes by which pharmacy in Britain and its colonies separated from medicine and made the transition from trade to profession during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain was founded in 1841, its founders considered pharmacy to be a branch of medicine. However, the 1852 Pharmacy Act made the exclusion of pharmacists from the medical profession inevitable, and in 1864 the General Medical Council decided that pharmacy legislation was best left to pharmacists themselves. Yet across the Empire, pharmacy struggled to establish itself as an autonomous profession, with doctors in many colonies reluctant to surrender control over pharmacy. In this book the author traces the professionalization of pharmacy by exploring issues including collective action by pharmacists, the role of the state, the passage of legislation, the extension of education, and its separation from medicine. The author considers the extent to which the British model of pharmacy shaped pharmacy in the Empire, exploring the situation in the Divisions of Empire where the 1914 British Pharmacopoeia applied: Canada, the West Indies, the Mediterranean colonies, the colonies in West and South Africa, India and the Eastern colonies, Australia, New Zealand, and the Western Pacific Islands. This insightful and wide-ranging book offers a unique history of British pharmaceutical policy and practice within the colonial world, and provides a firm foundation for further studies in this under-researched aspect of the history of medicine.

Following the thalidomide disaster1961 many accounts of pre-thalidomide drug safety history appeared. Some identified events which represented missed opportunities or ignored warning signs. This paper reviews three assertions made in these accounts; that an opportunity to introduce a spontaneous reporting system for suspected adverse drug reactions in 1893 was missed; that concerns about dangers of drugs in pregnancy identified in 1904 were ignored; and that a proposal to establish a drug regulatory body made in 1914 was abandoned. The paper concludes that even if all had been acted upon it is unlikely that the thalidomide disaster could have been entirely avoided.http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/1647-6336_14_3

When Wallace Sayre declared that 'public and private organizations are alike in all unimportant respects' a quest began to establish the truth or otherwise of this assertion. Researchers have been investigating the topic for over sixty years. They have focused on two key questions; what is meant by a public or private organization? And what constitute 'important respects' and 'unimportant respects' respectively? This paper reviews current evidence relating to the testing of Sayre's statement, focusing on the healthcare sector. It is concluded that research has failed to provide unequivocal evidence that particular aspects of publicness impact aspects of organizational performance in particular ways. Sayre got it wrong; public and private organizations are alike in all important respects. It is argued that it is time to call a halt to publicness studies; what matters is management and organization, and it is on these issues that public organization researchers should now concentrate.

This paper reports an exploratory study utilising a publicness model in which the impact of ownership, funding and mode of control on performance is moderated by organisational characteristics such as goals, structure and management. It describes the testing in 164 English hospital pharmacies of four health sector-relevant characteristics; diffusion of ownership (number of owners), priority of financial goals, congruence of core purpose (goals of sub-unit compared to organisation), and proximity of control (hierarchical levels between sub-unit and top management). Associations between these and four indicators of performance (managerial effectiveness, utilisation of human resources, work quality and employee satisfaction) were examined. Statistically significant relationships were seen between three of the organisational characteristics and some aspect of performance. Priority of financial goals was associated with perceptions of managerial performance, and proximity of control with use of human resources, work quality and employee satisfaction. Further elucidation of such characteristics may be justified.