234 Botanic Drugs 



upon the use of these agents has accumulated, 

 much of it sufficiently critical to give a hope that 

 they are supplementary or auxiliary means for com- 

 bating the disease that may not be ignored, espe- 

 cially so in view of the paucity of resource available 

 and the further fact that their discreet use is harm- 

 less to the patient. And it seems, from hundreds 

 of clinical cases reported, that the post-operative 

 use of this form of treatment gives encouraging 

 results in many cases; but it should be emphasized 

 that neither Autolysin nor Plantex should be used 

 to supplant any of the recognized forms of treat- 

 ment. 



Horowitz and Beebe have evolved a lot of theory 

 upon the subject, the latter claiming that "chloro- 

 phyll, lipoids, and extractive matter" are the im- 

 portant content. For recent data on the lipoids 

 (lipins), see "Physiological Chemistry" by Mathews 

 (William Wood and Company). Furthermore, cer- 

 tain stearoptenes, such as camphor and menthol, 

 are really terpenes, or stearols of the terpene group, 

 which may be classed as lipins (lipoids) from a 

 chemical basis. See "Abies" for a discussion of 

 the terpenes. And it must also be conceded that 

 chlorophyll yields pyrrol derivatives, like hemo- 

 globin does. Chlorophyll has a plant function 

 strikingly akin to blood corpuscles in biologic life. 

 Plant chromoproteins are wonderful agents. What 

 do they do when injected into the blood? 



Perhaps if plant extracts containing lipins plus 

 chlorophyll (it is hard to separate the two), and 

 lipins only of the terpene group stearoptenes, etc. 

 were injected into the blood-stream, some pretty 

 definite things would be done by them in the direc- 



