INTRODUCTION. XXXIX 



Thus a reaction seemed to have set in, in favor of plants 

 being used as medicines. Referring to the use of the Bilberry 

 (Vaccinium Myrtillus) as a remedy in Typhoid fever and other 

 infectious diseases of the intestine— a paper read by Dr. Max M. 

 Bernstein, M.B., before the Hunterian Society of London and 

 published in the British Medical Journal for 7th February, 1903, 

 — Sir James Sawyer, M. D., London, F.R.C.P., Senior Consult- 

 ing Physician to the Queen's Hospital ; and Ex-Professor of 

 Medicine in the Queen's College, Birmingham, wrote in the 

 British Medical Journal for February, 4 28th, 1903 : — "Long 

 have some of us dwelt with affection, and with hope of finding 

 modern uses for some old drugs which were being lost to sight 

 and to memory in the limbus of the past, and perhaps not 

 without some practical success, upon the archaeology of our 

 Medicinal " Simples," upon the histories and lore, upon the forms, 

 virtues, and renown of many old-time Medicinal plants, upon 

 plants called simples because each of them has been held to 

 enshrine its particular curative virtue, and so to furnish a simple 

 remedy for some symptom of disease, or for some individual 

 morbid manifestation. Perhaps we have loved to walk, as Evelyn 

 did, " into a large garden, esteemed for its furniture one of the 

 fairest, especially for simples ;" or perhaps we have followed 

 our own Garth, " when simpling on the flowery hills he strayed." 

 # * # 



" True is it to-day as when Sir Thomas Watson so declared 

 a third of a century ago that ' the greatest gap in the science 

 of Medicine is to be found in its final and supreme stage— the 

 stage of therapeutics.' Therapeutics advances by our increas- 

 ing knowledge of the nature of morbid processes and of the 

 physiological effects of remedies, and also by studying again 

 many a good old drug by the light of later scientific methods 

 and also by judicious selection from the traditions of popular 

 medicine. Such selection gave us Digitalis." 



Dr. Ischirch, Professor of Practical Chemistry in the Univer- 

 sity of Berne, is reported in the Lancet of 2nd October, 1909, 

 to have said : — 



'We may assuredly hope that medicine, when it has 

 thoroughly ruined its digestion with synthetical remedies and 



