498  The  Old-Fashioned  Pharmacist.     {AmjJ°y rI^Ih8arm' 
that  some  of  the  most  prominent  schools  and  teachers  of  the  day 
recognize  the  value  of  drugs  and  are  staunch  advocates  of  their  use. 
The  indirect  result  of  this  trend,  however,  has  been  that  there 
is  less  and  less  demand  by  physicians  of  pharmacists  for  profes- 
sional services ;  and  yet  many  physicians  condemn  pharmacists  for 
the  too  largely  non-professional  character  of  pharmacy.  If  the 
practice  of  pharmacy  in  the  retail  drug  store  of  today  is  not  as  pro- 
fessional as  it  should  be,  the  fault  is  chiefly  with  the  medical  pro- 
fession by  reason  of  its  neglect  of  materia  medica  and  therapeutics, 
although  the  pharmaceutical  profession  itself  is  by  no  means  blame- 
less. 
As  usual,  in  medical  history,  the  pendulum  has  swung  from  one 
extreme  to  the  other.  Formerly,  drug-therapeutics  was  everything 
in  medical  practice  and  preventive  medicine  a  dream;  now  pre- 
ventive medicine  is  everything  and  drug-therapeutics  is  nothing, 
relatively.  The  truth  is,  of  course,  between  the  two  extremes. 
There  is  a  brilliant  future  for  preventive  medicine,  but  there  can  be, 
also,  an  equally  brilliant  future  for  drug-therapeutics.  It  is  most 
desirable,  of  course,  that  every  step  be  taken  to  prevent  disease ;  but 
when  disease  is  present,  the  patient  does  not  care  then  to  know  how 
he  got  it,  or  how  he  can  avoid  getting  it  again ;  what  he  wants  to 
know  is  what  relief  he  can  get  nozv.  He  is  not  particularly  keen 
about  being  "  an  interesting  case  "  only  to  his  physician  !  He  wants 
something  done,  being  of  the  opinion  of  Jacobi,  that  "  those  who  die, 
die  ioo  per  cent." 
Some  one  has  said  that  the  medical  profession  has  "  run  after 
false  gods"  and  "fallen  down  on  its  job,"  that  it  does  not  get  as 
successful  clinical  results  as  it  did  when  drugs  were  more  generally 
used  (the  death  rate  of  pneumonia,  for  example,  twenty-five  years 
ago  was  25  per  cent.;  today  it  is  from  30  to  50  per  cent.)  and  that 
in  consequence,  the  confidence  of  the  public  in  physicians  has  be- 
come so  weakened  that  osteopathy,  Christian  Science,  and  patent 
medicines  particularly,  have  obtained  their  present  widespread 
vogue. 
But,  whether  this  is  true  or  not,  the  fact  remains  that  thousands 
of  years  of  clinical  experience  have  shown  that  drugs,  rightly  used, 
have  real  possibilities  of  usefulness  in  clinical  conditions.  It  may 
be  that  the  results  gotten  cannot  always  be  explained  with  modern 
scientific  exactitude — the  individual  drug-reaction  in  the  treatment 
of  disease  may  be  too  variable  to  do  so — but  this  does  not  justify 
