XXXVlll INTRODUCTION. 



extract our medicines from the natural products in which they 

 are contained, we seek to make for ourselves such substances as 

 shall possess the particular action we desire."* 



This method had been pursued since the time when 

 Professors Crum Brown and Fraser were able to demonstrate 

 the connection between chemical constitution and physiological 

 action. "With the help of the advanced chemistry of modern 

 times, an attempt to establish rational therapeutics was being 

 made by the leading pharmacologists of the world. Thus 

 the employment of inorganic salts and chemical principles 

 obtained from the vegetable kingdom, which had been much 

 in vogue about half a century ago, was being gradually 

 abandoned in favor of derivatives obtained from coal-tar and 

 various alcohols. As was once pointed out by the authors of 

 the Extra Pharmacopoeia, " the place in medical treatment, of 

 quinine and morphine, the two mainstays of the medical 

 practitioners of twenty years ago, is in a great measure filled 

 by antipyrin, antifebrin, phenacetin, exalgine, and salicylate 

 of sodium on the one hand, and by sulphonal, tetronal, chloral, 

 &c, on the other. "y The day was eagerly looked forward to 

 when the articles of our organic materia medica were to be 

 supplanted by the creations of the chemist. 



Analogy however is no safe guide in science. So Brun ton's 

 comparison of the different articles of Materia Medica to the 

 weapons of the different geologic periods, is, to say the least, 

 very fallacious. There is something like what may be called 

 " Fashion in medicine." It is due to this "fashion," that some 

 of the good old remedies are labelled "out of fashion." For 

 long it was not considered fashionable to use crude herbs. 

 Synthetic remedies were the fashion of the day. It is not only 

 the great war which is now raging in Europe that has made 

 the pendulum of fashion swing from one extreme to the other, 

 but the oscillation was visible even a considerable time before 

 the outbreak of the War. 



* The British Medical Journal for August 14th, 1886, p. 326. 

 | Extra Pharmacopeia by Martiudale an:l Westcott. Preface to the sixth 

 edition, p. III. 



