Fifty years in homoeopathy R. H. R. PRATT

The above title is an understatement, for hom0eopathic "pills" formed an integral part of the contents of the medicine cupboard in my childhood home, and were quickly produced by my father and administered to the family when demanded by the occasion.

My father, Reginald Pratt, worked with A. Nelson and Company for 45 years, and my own association with the Company could be said to have begun in 1915, when, as a baby in long clothes, I was carried in to "meet the staff' . I have nostalgic memories of childhood visits to the shop in Duke Street, where, for a treat, I would be allowed to put paper caps on bottles, sometimes to be rewarded with a penny or two from Mr. Nelson himself!

During the first world war, whilst my father was in the army, my mother and two aunts worked in the pharmacy, so it is perhaps not surprising that I followed in the family's footsteps.

In September 1930, I joined the Company as a shorthand typist, but, there not being sufficient to occupy me full time in this field, I started to "learn the business".

We served a long apprenticeship in those days. For two years I did nothing but make up powders into packets for use in the dispensary, and the next two years making "trituration tab le t s" - -a hand-made tablet which requires a considerable amount of expertise to produce properly, and, in those days, an even greater amount of elbow grease to grind large quantities of ingredients together.

I had been with the Company for two years when I had reason to be pro- foundly grateful for homoeopathy. At the age of five, nine months in hospital with scarlet fever and a diseased mastoid left me almost stone deaf and I was to have a childhood history of discharging ears and violent ear and head pains. Dudley Everitt, then Company Secretary, and a very able hom0eopathic prescriber, gave me one powder of Sulphur 1M-- the next day I was in bed! and there I stayed for nearly three weeks with greatly aggravated symptoms, learning hom0eopathy the hard, but fortunately uncommon way. The symptoms eventually subsided; I had two weeks by the seaside and then back to work. The result? Freedom from ear trouble from that far offday in 1932 to the present time.

As a teenage junior it fell to my lot to convey homceopathic medicines to Buckingham Palace, St. James's Palace, and Clarence House. I recall how impor- tant I used to feel when the policeman at the gate of Buckingham Palace, having asked me my business, admitted me, whilst the curious (or envious) stares of the sightseers followed me across the square. The late King Haakon of Norway used to stay at Claridges on his visits to London and I was never permitted to leave a

116 The British Homaeopathic Journal

package of medicine with the por ter - - i t had to be delivered personally. Many of Nelson's customers bore celebrated names and I recall Rachmaninoff,

Mr Gordon Selfridge, Lt. Gen. Carton de Wiart, that one-eyed, one-armed soldier who carried himself so erect, and I used to think how like a storybook buccaneer he looked. Stage and screen were well represented also.

My progress through every aspect of the business was made smooth by my mentor, Dudley Everitt, who encouraged me to learn as much as possible about the remedies, how they were made and used, and even how to pack them expertly. And so, as the years passed, I was taught to dispense, to make mother tinctures, potencies, ointments, ampoules, to take doctors' prescriptions over the telephone, and to attend to the needs of customers who called at the shop. I had the privilege of dispensing all the Royal prescriptions, for the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor), King George VI, Her Majesty The Queen, The Queen Mother, various other members of the Royal family, and foreign Royalties, until this was taken over by Mrs Yvonne Ford who has dispensed them since.

During the war years we did not escape unscathed. An oil bomb on the King's Weigh House church next door brought the whole of the rear of the premises down and we were knee deep in bricks for three weeks. No help was forthcoming and we had to clear it all ourselves. As fast as the front window was replaced it was blown out again. Production continued during the blitz and we all took our turns of fire duty at night. For some weeks the rear of the shop was open to the weather before we could even obtain a tarpaulin, and then we worked under this makeshift roof in appallingly bad light for nearly a year.

Although life had its hectic moments, generally the pace was slower than nowadays. The dispensing of an order or prescription was accomplished with the minimum of paper work and supplies of raw materials were cheap and easy to obtain.

"The old order changeth" and looming on the horizon was the forthcoming Medicines Act of 1968 and 1971. Lists of products had to be submitted to the Department of Health and all sorts of information given, such as active ingredients; size, shape and weight of tablets; leaflets; labels; cartons, etc. We were plunged into a welter of paperwork hitherto unknown and at the end were given a Product Licence of Right. In the middle of all this in 1972 came the disastrous Trident air crash in which Mr and Mrs Everitt lost their lives. Also killed were a number of homoeopathic doctors, many of them known to me, and Mr F. W. Adams, retired Secretary of the Pharmaceutical Society of Gt Britain, who had become interested in homoeopathy and was currently working on the requirements of the Medicines Act on our behalf.

The loss of Mr Everitt brought a period of uncertainty into our lives until the Company was bought by a registered charity which is non-profit-making, when we entered into a new era. An up-to-date laboratory was built in our premises in South London and fitted, with all the necessary equipment for quality control. Raw materials were now quarantined until properly tested and released. A pressurized 'clean room' came into being and has been equipped with the latest machinery for making and tubing ointments, and other machinery and equipment has been installed.

Volume 69, Number 2, April 1980 117

Looking back over half a century I have seen many changes in the Company, and although a whiff of nostalgia comes over me now and again I am proud of the new standards of quality achieved with modern systems and laboratory equip- ment.

Well, there they a r e - - a few memories from across the years, and, since this is far from being a "swan song", the hope of more in the future, for God willing, I shall serve homoeopathy for many years to come.

News from the Faculty and the Trust

(c)

118

Nineteen-eighty will be a year of great importance to homceopathy, even greater than last year in which so much took place both in the Parliamentary field and within the Faculty and Trust.

In March 1979, the Early Day Motion had been signed by 230 Members of Parliament and Mr Tom Ellis MP was starting to organize a Petition for presen- tation to Parliament. Our Campaign to seek recognition for our Courses from the Council for Postgraduate Medical Education was also continuing. The latter campaign has made no progress-- in fact our relationship with the Council has deteriorated, culminating in a letter which the Secretary received from the Secretary of the Postgraduate Council in which it was announced that it had been noticed that letters from doctors asking for recognition arrived in spates following each Course run by the Faculty and that therefore the letters were written on the instructions of the Faculty and could not be considered spontaneous expressions. In other words, the whole campaign was a "put-up" job and doctors' letters had been consigned to the wastepaper basket. A letter from our Secretary to the Postgraduate Council asking for the letters to be returned so that they could be sent to someone who would take notice of them, has been ignored and remains unanswered.

At exactly 11.05 a.m. on Friday 13 July 1979, Mr Tom Ellis presented his petition to "lie upon the table" in the House of Commons. It contained 116,781 signatures and the full text of the Petition was read out to the Members of Parliament assembled in the House and recorded in full in Hansard. The Petition asked Parliament to urge the Secretary of State for Health to:

(a) give an undertaking as to the continuance of The Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital with its postgraduate teaching on its present s i t e -

(b) declare that homaeopathy should be more readily available for all those citizens who desire i t - - make grants available in order that doctors who wish to qualify in homoeopathy, may do so.

The British Homoeopathie Journal