INTRODUCTION.
Whatever may be the position of British pharmacists in comparison with those of other countries, it cannot be said that they have paid the attention to the analysis of urine which the subject has received from pharmacists on the Continent. Considering the importance of the subject, this curious neglect can only be attributed to the fact that the pharmacist in Great Britain is but slowly attaining the position of chemical expert to the physician, which his foreign confrere has so long held with credit and even distinction. In France, for example, M. Méhu, whose name is familiar to readers of this journal, is looked upon as one of the leading authorities on morbid urine and its analysis, and yet a list of goodly pharmaceutical papers shows that, as the medical analyst, he has not forgotten his connection with pure pharmacy.
There are several points about urinary analysis which entitle it to a very high position in the estimation of pharmacists. In the first place, the physician is no more likely to be fonder of the test tube than of the pestle, of analyzing urine than of compounding his own medicines. Leading men in the profession are more and more setting their faces against the dispensing doctor, and there are numbers among them who admit that they succeed no better as analysts than they do as dispensers.
Some old fashioned practitioners trouble themselves very little about their patients' urine, except, perhaps, in respect of sugar and albumen. On the other hand, numbers of leading physicians, including especially those highly educated gentlemen who cultivate a consulting practice, are in the habit of pushing urinary analysis almost to an excess. One well-known specialist of the writer's acquaintance, with an extensive West End practice, makes quantitative determinations of urea, uric acid, and total acidity, in addition to conducting other diagnostic experiments, on every occasion that he interviews his patients. By this means he has accumulated in his case books a mass of data which he considers most valuable as an aid to diagnosis, and through that to successful treatment.
Pharmacists are proverbially neat-handed, as Mr. Martindale would say, and their habit of conducting dispensing operations which involve the dexterous manipulation of very small quantities of material fit them admirably to undertake volumetric and other rapid analytical determinations. Compared with the doctor there is no doubt that in this matter the chemist is facile princeps, and from the nature of their respective occupations such could only have been expected. A few chemists throughout the country lay themselves out to save their local doctors from unwelcome test tube practice, and these almost to a man find it pay. Some charge a handsome fee to patients, and a small one when the analysis comes through the physician. Others find it to their interest to furnish medical men with qualitative reports on sugar or albumen gratuitously. Although this practice has certain obvious drawbacks, if a doctor sends his prescriptions to a chemist, the latter is often willing to gratuitously perform his chemical work. In the present article we propose to describe briefly but fully the methods which have been found of most value in practice.