Medicine: Prescriptions

A prescription is something that a physician writes with a gold fountain pen on a little pad with incredible rapidity. “Get that filled,” he says with a cheery nod, and drives away in his buggy or his Isotta limousine. The person lying sick tries to read the hieroglyphics scrawled on the bit of paper. Those venomous little curlicues, what do they mean? Of course the chances are that the physician was an honest fellow, but—well, there is something sinister about a prescription, the sick one thinks. It might mean absolutely anything. Suppose the doctor had taken a dislike to him; he might have written:

“Apothecary: Burn this one’s insides out with cyanide of mercury and oblige,

DR. DRUGGET.”

Or suppose, on the other hand, that the doctor was honest, but that the pharmacist, unable to read what had been prescribed, made some fatal mistake? And who could read a rigmarole like that?

Reasoning in a similar vein, one Marshall Hadely, a druggist in Middlesex, England, wrote a physician a letter which was read before the local medical committee:

“I have been trying to force medical men who are rotten writers to use typewriters. I guess you would come under that rule. It doesn’t strike me as a fair deal to your patients that your writing should not be so legible that any chemist could read it. Suppose it were urgent and none but Blank could read the writing and Blank’s store was closed. You would sign a death certificate just so. A nod is as good as a wink, and this note may lead to some intelligibility.”

The committee reported: “This letter is . . . most improper.”