BOTANY TO MEDICINE. ' 261 



and even the proportionate doses for every age, are duly set down. 

 I always consult that book before I prescribe, and therefore. Madam, 

 cannot be under a mistake." So that, really, with a good druggist, 

 named bottles and jars, and Thompson's Dispensatory upon his 

 counter, such a man may do a good stroke of business, as the mer- 

 cantile phrase has it, with very little judgment, but a great deal of 

 satisfaction — to himself. For the sake of their patients, I fear very 

 few such attend here ; for they would learn, at least, that drugs 

 will vary very greatly in quality — that the bark, the root, the herb 

 of the same species, gathered at different seasons, do not contain the 

 same principles ; this, at one period, is an active medicine, at ano- 

 ther, next to useless ; and besides, if chicanery will practice upon 

 the immediate necessaries of life, the commerce of medicine is not 

 likely to be wholly free from its impositions. 



Experience has shewn that not only the imported articles of the 

 materia medica, but even those of home growth, are often the ve- 

 hicles of fraud that renders negative, if it does not totally subvert 

 the intentions of the adviser. The leaves of the senna are mingled 

 with those of several other plants, of less valuable and of deleterious 

 quality ; the lithontriptic and diuretic properties of the uva-ursi, 

 are supplanted by the simple astringency of the vaccin. vit. id. : and 

 €ven the bark of the tree of life itself — the highly-prized cinchona 

 —-is vilified, and its restorative virtues abused, by the cupidity of 

 the fraudulent and grasping trader, who, with no other object in 

 view than that of his individual profit, scruples not to impose upon 

 his ignorant customers that of other trees of inferior worth. Now, 

 even in the state in which these and numerous other vegetable sub- 

 stances are submitted to the inspection of the faculty, a knowledge 

 of botany will often afford a test of no small importance in the 

 choice of an article which a person proposes to prescribe and admi- 

 nister, where his fortune, and, what is more valuable to a medical 

 man, his reputation, is at stake. Even a very few years since, how 

 few in this country were possessed of a sufficient share of that know- 

 ledge for such an application of it. Men who had risen to the 

 highest rank in their profession, scarce knew a nettle from a crow- 

 foot, and the capability of not confounding a mullein with a fox- 

 glove, seemed almost a miraculous stretch of botanical acquirement 



