Pharmacy Laws Began In The Thirteenth Century

Press, Volume C, Issue 29691, 8 December 1961, Page 21

Pharmacy Laws Began In The Thirteenth Century

The relation between modern pharmacy and a thirteenth century king may seem remote yet many of the rules that now govern the conduct of pharmacists come from the laws laid down by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Emperor of Germany and King of the Two Sicilies in the 13th Century.

The living link between the Occidental and the Oriental, it was he who gave pharmacy its first legal independence as a profession. The seventh to twelfth centuries saw Islam and Christianity as well as Judaism in intimate contact in Spain and Sicily. These countries were the two principal points from which the Latin west drew on the Graeco-Arabic knowledge of medicine, according to Mr G. A. Ben-

der, editor of Modern Pharmacy, who has made an extensive study of the early origins of pharmacy. After the fall of the Sicilian city of Syracuse in to the hands of the Arabs in 878, Sicily became a seat of Arabic culture until 1061, when the Normans attacked the country and subjugated it by 1069. In European countries exposed to the Arabian influences, public pharmacies began to appear in the eleventh century. But it

was not until 1240 when Frederick II finished the reorganisation of the politically and racially torn kingdom of the Two Sicilies that pharmacy was separated legally from medicine and made an integral part of a public welfare system based on the Arabian patterns. The essential regulations concerning pharmacy in the laws laid down by Frederick II were:— (1) Complete separation of the pharmaceutical profession from any medical

profession. Any business relation between pharmacist and physician, either in open and hidden partnership was forbidden. (2) Official supervision of pharmaceutical practice, with rigid penalties in cases of violation of the duties of a pharmacist. (3) Compulsory use of a prescribed formality in order to guarantee the reliability and uniformity of the drugs prepared by the apothecary. Two further rules provided for a limit on the number of licenced pharmacies and for the government to fix the prices of drugs. The first three rules achieved almost universal application in the centuries that followed and Frederick II can certainly be regarded as the founder of the code and rules under which modem pharmacists operate.