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owner of Freeman’s Homœopathic Pharmacy.
My new knowledge and my restraint were tested on my first day back in practice. On Saturday morning my first house call (house call? Those were the days!) was to a 10- year-old boy with acute tonsillitis. I wrote the penicillin prescription but his high fever, red face, thirstless and dilated pupils shouted “Belladonna”! (Medical School pharmacology and Spanish Ladies came to mind). From my new 1gram kit I made three small packets of Belladonna 30c crystals and gave the first dose. Whilst I stood at the door explaining to Mum, the boy got up, went to the kitchen tap and filled and drank a glass of water. Astonishment ! “ What did you just give him? He has not moved for the last 36 hours!” I followed up at 4pm and next day; he did not use the antibiotic.
At a house call later that morning, a teenager with acute abdominal pain and diarrhoea lay curled up with a hot water bottle He responded quickly to Colocynth 30; his pain disappeared during the time it took to explain this new medicine. He did not use the prescribed ‘Lomotil’.
Well, I was hooked! Prescribing small amounts of crystals from the one gram glass tubes meant that I had to fold each dose into slips of paper. So, I obtained my own basic kit from which to dispense. As confidence grew, I began to prescribe more homœopathy and then to hold stock of 95%medicating tinctures.
I took Dr Jack's idea a little further and made an arrangement with the Surrey Area Health Authority allowing me to prescribe “Dr Jack’s Pack” in the name of one patient in a family. That meant all twenty-two medicines as a single pack of seven gram vials of tablets. By prescribing for a child or an expectant mum the family
got the whole pack without charge. The Health Authority was co- operative because the medicines were then still in the NHS Drug Tarif.
Mr Gordon Cooper who owned the private pharmacy in Chiddingfold was senior enough to have learned about homœopathy during his training: he was happy to maintain a small stock of homœopathic medicines.
Although he could have charged a dispensing fee for each of the twenty-two medicines, he claimed only one fee for the whole pack. Even had he done so, the total cost to the NHS would have been less than the latest NSAID or antibiotic.
Cooper’s Pharmacy became the only stockist for a radius of 50 miles.
I began to see less of certain families. Many young mothers and grannies became reasonably expert at prescribing from Dr Jack’s GP Label indications. They began to rely on themselves to treat minor problems rather than coming down to the Practice “Since we had that Kit you don’t see so much of us, Doctor.” They valued
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