THE CULTIVATION OF DRUG CLERKS.

THE cultivation and development of the
gentle drug clerk promises at last to be-
come 'one of the popular amusements of the
day. There can be no doubt that this
purely ornamental feature of modern life may

with attention be made really harmless if not
entirely useful. The proposition of a wealthy
widower in Chicago, whose wife was torn
from his bosom by the playful inadvertence of
a soda-water boy in a fashionable drug store,
to found a prize to be awarded to the dispenser
of medicines who shall possess with the ele-
ments of a common education the common
elements of discretion, has drawn attention to
the natural resources of this unworked field.
Why may not the boys who dispense soda-
water with fluent innocence have their sphere
of usefulness enlarged by stimulating induce-
ments to the dispensing of more necessary
and more deadly poisons? Some years ago Dr.
Ogden Doremus and a few other specialists
of this city conceived the not altogether fanci-
ful idea that car-driving and drug-dispensing
were not interchangeable occupations, and they
agitated the subject of drug-clerk cultivation
with commendable earnestness for several
months. Their investigations brought to light
a great many curious facts in the natural his-
tory of the drug clerk. He was found to be
an overworked, underpaid incompetent, ex-
hibiting under examination about as much
pharmaceutical knowledge as a comic almanac.
Examples of his dispensing skill were produced,
and the careless prodigality with which he
disseminated arsenic to the human race when
they asked him for magnesia, and added ox-
alic acid to the mild expectations of the indis-
posed, created the most profound admiration.
He really went through his narrow life a hero
in spite of incompetency, wearing good clothes
on a poor salary, and, notwithstanding his
responsibility, his poverty and his un-
ending duties, keeping up a smiling counte-
nance and scattering the pharmacopœia as he
journeyed. It was found, indeed, that many
of these death-dealing persons possessed abili-
ties which in other walks of life would have
won for them distinction and a competence.
There was one whose talents as a wheel-
wright were said to be pre-eminent, and
another had shown something like the divine
spark of genius in cleaning kid gloves. All
of them were a little shaky in their Latin, but
all of them could sell a tooth-brush or put up
chewing-gum with the fascinating grace of
Apollo himself. It was upon the basis of these
moral qualities, rather than upon the absence
of all technical knowledge, that the Examining
Commission sought to operate on the de-
velopment of the modern drug clerk. But
we are sorry to say that little, if anything,
was ever done to make the culture a popular
one. Recently the achievement of a provin-
cial dispenser, who served out the spirits in-
stead of the water of camphor to a debilitated
infant, with supreme disregard of the prescrib-
ing physician, seems to have reopened the eyes
of the public to the vast possibilities which are
in these fellows. The man who can draw a
draft of speedy death with the same lofty un-
concern that accompanies his oblation of the
grateful and innocuous soda, appears to be
worthy of more attention than society has yet
bestowed upon him. An age given to positive
material triumphs may find in these negative
moral victories something that law, if not
science, may proudly deal with. And so, if the
thing goes on, the cultivation of drug clerks
may in time become more obligatory, if not as
fashionable, as was once the cultivation of
tulips.