Am."  Jour.  'Pharm. 
March,  1910. 
|        Physiological  Standardization.  109 
at  the  infant  science,  it  is  little  marvel  that  some  have  been  neg- 
lected. And  even  to-day  the  little  handful  of  men  who  are  working 
in  this  line  are  being  assailed  on  every  hand  to  answer  the  widest 
variety  of  questions.  We  are  supposed  to  tell  immediately  the 
exact  physiological  effects  of  new  synthetics  which  are  being  dumped 
upon  the  profession  by  the  wagon-load,  to  discover  the  laws  which 
govern  the  relation  of  chemical  composition  to  physiological  action 
so  that  the  chemists  may  dump  their  synthetized  garbage  upon  us 
still  more  rapidly,  we  are  asked  to  discover  at  once  specifics  for 
various  fatal  fevers  which  the  growing  intimacy  with  the  tropics  has 
made  so  important  to  civilized  peoples,  to  furnish  the  means  to  the 
physiologist  and  pathologist  for  solving  some  of  the  obscure  problems 
of  their  branches,  to  explain  to  the  clinician  the  mode  of  action 
of  the  ancient  remedies,  and  to  convince  him  of  the  worthlessness  of 
drugs  whose  inertness  is  hidden  beneath  the  traditions  of  antiquity 
or  the  glitter  of  the  advertiser's  gold,  to  suggest  new  uses  for  old 
drugs  and  new  drugs  for  old  diseases,  to — —  Can  you  contemn 
pharmacologists  that  they  have  failed  to  recognize  the  importance 
of  biological  assay  to  practical  medicine  ? 
As  a  result  of  this  the  development  of  the  physiological  assay  has 
been  left  largely  in  the  hands  of  the  manufacturers  and  they  have 
been  more  interested  in  developing  it  as  an  advertising  asset  than  as 
a  means  of  standardization.  This  may  seem  a  rather  sweeping 
accusation  but  I  think  it  no  great  exaggeration.  You  would  think 
it  strange,  to  say  the  least,  if  a  manufacturing  pharmacist  were  to 
entrust  all  his  chemical  work  to  a  young  man  with  no  more  experi- 
ence than  is  gathered  in  the  ordinary  course  in  a  pharmaceutical 
college ;  and  if  this  same  manufacturer  were  then  boastingly  to  ad- 
vertise his  chemical  control  of  all  his  products  you  would  hardly 
hesitate  to  criticize.  Yet  the  situation  in  many  of  the  so-called 
pharmacologic  departments  of  wholesale  druggists  is  even  worse  than 
this.  You  know  that  practical  experience  is  necessary  before  a  man 
can  be  trusted  to  turn  out  reliable  chemical  assays,  no  amount  of 
book  learning  can  take  the  place  of  the  actual  manipulation  of  the 
process.  If  this  is  true  of  chemical  work  in  which  we  can  put  down 
in  black  and  white  the  difficulties  one  is  likely  to  encounter,  how  in- 
finitely more  necessary  is  practical  experience  in  a  field  where  we 
know  almost  nothing  of  the  way  in  which  we  may  go  astray,  where 
reliable  methods  have  not  even  been  worked  out,  and  where  we  are 
