WHAT IS PHARMACY

Pharmacy is defined as the art science of recognizing identifying collecting; selecting, preparing, storing, compounding and dispensing used in preventive or in curative medicine for treating people.
Pharmacy was an integral part of medicine when preparative pharmaceutical techniques were simple. It became an independent branch of medicine when an increasing variety of drugs and their complex compounding demanded specialists familiar with the technique of their compounding. Thus we may define pharmacy as the science of drugs. The word "pharmacy" comes from the Greek word "pharmakon" which in the modern language means "a drug". To the Greeks it was associated with a god or higher being who had the power of affecting people with herbs, infusions, etc.
Pharmacy is as old as man himself. The first primitive man who tried to use a plant in the food and observed that it caused a disease was already in the drug business. In this simple way many drugs have been discovered.
The civilization of the past contributed to our present knowledge by the collection of drugs and drug preparations. The old Egyptian texts list many preparations, some components of which are still used in modified form. In these works the important beginning of the science pharmacognosy may be seen. Galen, in the second century A.D. one of the most famous physicians of the past wrote much about drug effects. Even today pharmacists use the word "galenicals" when they speak about simple vegetable extracts.
However, only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -chemical knowledge advanced to the point at which it could contribute significantly to pharmacology.
The first and the most important was the isolation in relatively pure chemical form of the active constituents of plants. For example, Serturner isolated morphine in 1806 from opium. It took man over 5000 years to make this very important step. The industrial revolution of the last century gave birth to synthetic organic chemistry and established a new branch of knowledge necessary for the synthesis of new drugs.
That the drug may affect the organism or may act more selectively was an empirical observation of a primitive man. However, it took many centuries to establish this empirical observation scientifically. Today the biochemical investigation of drug action is as important as the older pharmacodynamic studies.
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