ABSTRACT
The role of professions is well represented in historical writing about health and welfare, particularly with regard to the medical and nursing professions, and to a lesser extent of the professions supplementary to medicine, such as chiropody, optics and physiotherapy. There has also been significant interest, particularly through oral history, in the continuing role of lay care, in the growth in use of complementary medicine, and in the role of non-medically qualified practitioners in health and welfare. Yet the role of the pharmacist in this area has been surprisingly neglected. Pharmacists in the community, or ‘chemists’ as they were always known, both by themselves and the public,1 have long occupied an indeterminate terrain in health and welfare, falling somewhere between business and professionalism, and between professional care and lay care-tensions which remain largely unresolved to this day.
