“Hello!” answered the voice at the other end of the line. “Is this eight-six-one-five-nine?” “Aw, g’wan! Phwat d’ ye t’ink I am? A box car?”--_Exchange._ The Future of Pharmacy in Relation to the Modern Development of Medicine By WILLIAM G. TOPLIS _Proceedings of Pennsylvania Pharmaceutical Association._ The year Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-one is destined to become known in medical and pharmaceutical history as the beginning of the most revolutionary epoch in all of the experience of those branches of endeavor. That year brought forth a discovery whose importance is not yet generally recognized. Not alone is it concerned with medicine and pharmacy, but it has performed a most important service in engineering projects of world-wide importance. It may be truthfully said that this discovery and those it led up to, made possible the building of the Panama Canal. It was a most important factor in bringing victory to Japan and defeat to Russia. It is banishing pestilence from its breeding places everywhere, and no department of life, either animal or vegetable, is beyond its influence. It has placed the practice of medicine upon a scientific basis, and inaugurated the era of preventive medicine. The day of curative measures, with which we are most familiar, is passing. In most of the cities and large communities of the world, Public Hygiene has become a very important department of government. Observe our own city of Philadelphia; we have there the largest water purification plant in existence. Its effect, in that city is to reduce the number of typhoid fever cases 80 per cent. of the former total, and perhaps 100 per cent. of the water borne typhoid, peculiar to the Philadelphia water supply. A case of typhoid fever commonly runs three months. In money it is worth from fifty to one hundred dollars to the attending physician, perhaps half of that to the druggist. A similar change has taken place concerning diphtheria. Anti-toxin and treatment are supplied to the patient at the expense of the communities in by far the greater number of cases. Smallpox is practically unknown, for similar reasons. Bacterins as prophylactic measures against typhoid, and a number of other diseases, are coming into increased usefulness. Chemo Therapy. The latest advance has done astounding things. With one treatment of 606, Salvarsan, specific disease disappears to return no more. At least it seems so at this early date. Much is promised from the same source in the eradication of cancer. Leprosy, incurable, from remote antiquity, seems about to succumb to the new enlightenment. The extermination of tuberculosis is within hailing distance. And so on through the whole catalogue of ills that plagued the people, unrestrained, less than 30 years ago.