Medicines and trials

The thirty-fourth entry is la préparation officinale, and the adjective at the end of it is the one an English reader repairs without noticing. « Officinal » does exist in English and almost nobody reaches for it, so the eye slides across to « official » and a pharmacy bench turns into a ministry. Nothing here has been approved by anybody. The word belongs to l’officine, which is the working room behind a chemist’s counter, and officinal means prepared there, to a formula already printed in the pharmacopoeia. That is what separates it from its neighbour la préparation magistrale, made up for one named patient on one doctor’s prescription. So render the entry as « the stock pharmacy preparation », and keep « official » for the things an authority really has signed. One more turn is worth carrying away, because it runs the other way entirely: said of anything that is not a chemist’s, une officine is a back room with something to hide, as in une officine de propagande. The sneer is in the word, and « office » has never had it.