The demedicalization of prescribing

Abstract

It is a great honour to give the Salter lecture in this historic building, to your Society. Adrian Salter [1] was born in 1934 and died aged 59 in 1993. He was trained at St Thomas’s Hospital, did national service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, returned to work with Professor John Yudkin at Queen Elizabeth College and was awarded an MD for his work on dietary sugar and disease. In 1967 he joined Sandoz in Basle, Switzerland, and then moved to the Wellcome Foundation in 1969, where he became head of clinical investigation and contributed greatly to the development of Zyloric and Septrin, both important drugs then and now. He moved up to be European Medical Director interested particularly in the treatment of Aids and Hepatitis. He was one of the founding members of the Society of Pharmaceutical Medicine and indeed its first Secretary and I was interested to learn of the chord that had been struck when 400 people were present at the first inaugural meeting of the society in 1985–despite the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians there was clearly a need for an additional forum which would bring together both medical and non-medical scientists involved in the development of new medicines. Adrian Salter was plainly a sound professional man to whose memory I would like to pay tribute today.