i 3 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



study of the action of drugs, poisons and other substances which may 

 alter normal function. Its early development corresponds to the period 

 of the application of exact experimental methods to physiology which, 

 as has been shown in an earlier lecture, dates from about 1840. Buch- 

 heim, professor of materia medica at Dorpat, established in his own 

 house, in 1849, a laboratory for the study of pharmacological problems; 

 somewhat later this laboratory became a part of the University of Dor- 

 pat and was, therefore, the first laboratory to procure for pharmacology, 

 recognition as a science of university rank. Furthermore, Buchheim in 

 1876 in the Archiv f. experiment ell e Pathologie und Pharmakologie, 

 (founded in 1873) defined the methods and aims which have guided 

 pharmacological work for the past thirty-five years. He also made the 

 first classification of drugs according to their physiological action. 



The proper study of pharmacology is all-embracing. It includes not 

 only the study of the mode of action of remedial agents in healthy in- 

 dividuals and the influence on such action of various abnormal or pa- 

 thological conditions, but, also, the effect of a great variety of substances, 

 as bacterial toxins, the secretions of venomous serpents and the prod- 

 ucts of metabolism, in short, all animal, vegetable or mineral substances 

 in any way capable of altering normal physiology. Moreover, the study 

 of the effect of these various substances is not limited to man and the 

 higher animals, but includes the use of the lower invertebrate forms, 

 bacteria and protozoa. It is, therefore, an all-inclusive branch of biol- 

 ogy, dealing with the "comparative study of the action of chemical 

 bodies on invertebrate and vertebrate animals." Its achievements are of 

 interest to physiology, to which science it has contributed much, both in 

 method and in fact; to chemistry, in that pharmacology has added 

 largely to the data concerning the interaction of cell and chemical sub- 

 stance; and to practical therapeutics, in that it presents new remedies, 

 explains the action of old remedies and defines the limitations of drug- 

 therapy. Finally it has a definite relation to the general public welfare 

 in that, by its methods, it establishes procedures for determining the 

 potency of therapeutic remedies, thus preventing, on the one hand, ill 

 effect from a drug of unusual power, and, on the other, guaranteeing a 

 remedial agent of standard strength. 



Experimental Pathology and Pathological Physiology are branches 

 of pathology and physiology which, combining the methods of both 

 these sciences with those of chemistry, attempt, by the study of abnormal 

 conditions experimentally produced, to explain the disturbance in func- 

 tion consequent upon cell or tissue injury or disturbances in physiolog- 

 ical or chemical equilibrium. Combining as they do the methods of 

 several of the medical sciences, and having for their object the elucida- 

 tion of definite problems in clinical medicine, they are essentially the 



