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. 
Bernstem, 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 archreology 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 lias 
thoroughly ruined its digestion with synthetical remedies and 
