Profile of the pharmacist

Hello steemians friends, when we studied the beginnings of the profession of the pharmacist in Venezuela, as such, this was a person who manufactured the medicine in its entirety, obtained the active ingredient (s) as well as the excipients, gave a pharmaceutical form to the preparation so that it can be administered and finally the packaged and dispensed. All the work of production, processing and dispensation fell on one person.

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It is the time of the end of the 19th century, when the Pharmacy became a science, at the same time the Capitalist Revolution began to concentrate people in the cities, it formalized the exercise of the profession in the pharmacy and was born as a university career.

The University, at the time, as an institution of the primitive capitalist state had as its mission to train the former pharmacist (pharmacist) and graduate pharmacist with a galenic profile to perform as a manager of the establishment whose social importance was to provide the necessary drugs to rehabilitate sick workers and be able to reinsert them into their work units.

In Venezuela the university studies of Pharmacy began with the creation of the Faculty in 1894, during the second term of the President of the Republic Joaquín Crespo, disciple of Antonio Guzmán Blanco the Illustrious American, when the country was going through a stage of multiple economic problems the fall in coffee prices, a similar situation we are experiencing today with the fall in oil prices, and a territorial conflict in British Guiana.

Surely Pharmacy studies were driven by the need to activate the sovereign production of medicines, a need also today.
As for the subjects, a general physics was taught that included heat and electricity; three chemical: inorganic, organic and one applied to pharmaceutical analysis; a pharmacology; a toxicology and three fundamental matters more: mineralogy, botany and zoology, the latter are those related to the study of minerals, plants and animals. Galenic preparations characterized pharmaceutical practice.

Mineralogy, its study was fundamental, since a good part of the therapeutic arsenal were inorganic substances coming from minerals, it was necessary to go for the active principle in its deposit, zero dependence. From arsenic, through sodium chloride, iodine or the famous milk magnesia are some of the examples that can be cited from the hundreds of medicinal compounds that were part of the European (Greco-Arab) medical heritage and that nowadays They resist being discontinued by the market.

Botany, the study of the plants, since the vegetal matter was the original source of all the active organic principles, arsenal enriched with the ancestral knowledge of the American aboriginal population, which is now being replaced by synthetic derivatives after the appearance of the industry chemical and petrochemical.

Zoology, the study of animals was necessary to understand the third source from which the drugs emanate, from the legendary cod oil, through the anticoagulant heparin or pancreatic digestive enzymes to the invincible insulin. Almost everything today monopolized by genetic engineering.