On the Teaching of 

 Pharmacology, Materia Medica, 

 and Therapeutics in Our Medical 

 Schools 



JOHN J. ABEL, M.D. 



I 



T WOULD seem unnecessary to define in the columns of a medical 

 journal what is meant by pharmacology, but the frequent confusion 

 of this term with pharmacy by those who are not teachers of medicine 

 must serve as a reason for a brief statement of the methods and aims 

 of this branch of medical science. The vague and often erroneous use 

 of the word pharmacology seen in earlier writings, as in the definition 

 of Nathan Bailey (1736), "a treatise concerning drugs," or in that of 

 Samuel Johnson (1755), "an equivalent of pharmacy or pharmaceu- 

 tics," is still frequently met with in our own time. Briefly stated, 

 pharmacology tries to discover and explain all of the more obvious 

 functional, and the less noticeable chemical and physical changes 

 that occur in a living thing that has absorbed a substance capable of 

 producing such changes, and it is also its province to learn the fate 

 of the substance thus incorporated. It is not, therefore, an applied 

 science like therapeutics; it is one of the biological sciences, using that 

 term in its widest sense. 



The interested student of the history of medicine discovers in every 

 epoch some man far in advance of his contemporaries who may be 

 looked upon as a leader in one phase or another of our subject. Such 

 were Erasistratus, Dioscorides, Mesua, Avenzoar, Paracelsus, and Hal- 

 ler; and when we turn our attention to the modern laboratory methods 

 of pharmacology and the lasting achievements gained by their aid, 

 we find that the first great impulse was given by Magendie. That 

 great experimenter's classical research on the physiological action of 

 upas, undertaken early in the present century, was the first instance 

 of the completely successful application of the analytic method in the 



57 



