xxxviii 
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 antlpyrin, antifebrin, phenacetin, exalgine, and salicylate 
of sodium on the one hand, and by sulphonal, tetronal, chloral, 
&c., on the other.”! 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 Brunton’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 i£ 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. 826. 
t Extra Pharmacopoeia by Martindale and Westcott. Preface to the sixth 
edition, p. III. 
