4 President's Address. 



(3.) The botanic and natural classification of the 

 medicaments of vegetable origin is the only scientific and 

 rational one. 



Any one who reads Herlandt's paper with care cannot 

 fail to see that the suggestion of Linnteus was essentially 

 correct; and surely that establishes the importance, if not 

 necessity, of the study of botany by the student of medicine. 

 It is not, however, only regarding medicinal plants that 

 botanical knowledge is of service to a medical practitioner. 

 I may illustrate this by a case that occurred in my own 

 practice only a few months ago. A lady and gentleman 

 entered my study, bringing with them their little girl, and 

 exhibiting great anxiety and alarm lest she had poisoned 

 herself, as she had eaten one of some foreign seeds which 

 had been given her to play with. They had brought with 

 them a seed similar to the one which she had eaten, and 

 I was at once enabled to relieve their minds from all 

 anxiety, and to assure them that no injurious consequences 

 would result; for in the seed brought I recognised that of 

 Coix lachryma. Now, supposing the child had been taken 

 to the student or medical practitioner trained according 

 to the most recent advice of the lecturer referred to, she 

 would doubtless have been subjected to the misery resulting 

 from the administration of an active emetic, and the grief 

 and painful surmises of the parents would have remained 

 unallayed. But to pass to the province of pathology, I 

 assert — 



3d. That even in tracing the history of some diseases, 

 a knowledge of the lower forms of vegetation is of the 

 utmost importance. Who that knows anything of the 

 " germ-theory" is not aware of the fact that the Bacteria 

 and Vihriones have, by Lister's able researches, been shown 

 to be vegetable organisms?* Again, how is the medical 

 practitioner ignorant of botany to be able to give an opinion 

 as to the cryptogams which either cause or complicate so 

 many diseases of the scalp ? It is all very well to say 



* Need I refer to the researclies of Dr Klein in regard to what he styles 

 " Pneumo-enteritis" in swine, b}' which he has shown "that the microphyte 

 which accompanies the disease is botanically specific, and that both it and its 

 progeny can be conducted through a series of artificial cultivations apart from 

 the animal body ; and that germs thus remotely descended from a first con- 



