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OK DIGITALIS. 



As we review the rapid progress made within late years by 

 physiology, pathology, and other departments of medical science, 

 and compare it with the slow advance of therapeutics, we 

 experience a growing dissatisfaction with our present empirical 

 method of treatment, which, consisting, as it does, in the mere 

 tentative administration of drugs without a definite knowledge 

 of their action, must necessarily retard progress, the same 

 medicine being tried time after time by different physicians, 

 and the panacea of one generation being discarded by the next, 

 only to be again resorted to and trusted in by a third. 



Turning from this unsatisfactory method, we begin anxiously 

 to look for one of a more rational character, which shall bo 

 based not only on a knowledge of the changes induced by- 

 disease, but on a minute and accurate acquaintance with the 

 action of the remedies which we prescribe for its cure. 



At present, however, our knowledge of their action is ex- 

 tremely vague and superficial, consisting, in the majority of 

 cases, chiefly of the external symptoms manifested by animals 

 under the influence of poisonous doses, and of the changes 

 observed after their administration in disease, when it is often 

 extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to say how much 

 is owing to the drug, and how much to the natural course 

 of the malady. 



Perhaps no better example of the imperfection of our knov/- 

 ledge can be given than the views entertained respecting 

 digitalis, for although it is in daily and hourly use, and, for 

 several years back, hardly a month has passed without an 

 article upon it in one or other of the medical journals, it is 

 regarded by some as weakening the heart's action, by others as 

 strengthening it, some placing it at the head of the list of 

 diuretics, others denying that it possesses this property at all ; 



