Am"ju0iy!'i?96arm'}        Preparations  of  Strophanthus.  355 
of  strophanthus  is  an  active  preparation.  The  fact  of  the  great  per- 
centage of  rise  in  the  last  experiment,  when  the  spinal  cord  had  been 
previously  cut  and  the  vasomotor  system  paralyzed,  is  very  inter- 
esting as  an  evidence  of  the  little  action  which  this  drug  has  upon 
the  vasomotor  centres,  as  compared  with  what  it  has  upon  the  heart 
and  vessel  walls.  A  comparison  of  our  experiments  will  also 
show  the  great  difficulty  there  is  in  testing  drugs  by  comparative 
experiments  upon  the  lower  animals,  the  amount  of  rise  in  indi- 
vidual cases  produced  by  the  injection  being  entirely  out  of  propor- 
tion to  the  relation  between  the  dose  given  and  the  weight  of  the 
animal. 
If  the  extract  should,  as  we  believe  it  ought  to  be  introduced 
into  the  United  States  Pharmacopoeia,  it  is  evident  that  it  should  be 
made  by  a  process  which  will  give  a  fixed  product  for  the  amount 
of  drug  used.  Every  practitioner  of  medicine,  in  thinking  of  stro- 
phanthus therapeutically,  thinks  hot  of  the  drug  itself,  but  of  the 
tincture.  Ordinarily  the  doctor  has  no  knowledge  how  much  the 
tincture  of  strophanthus  represents,  his  unit  of  work  in  his  own 
mind  being  5  or  10  minims  of  the  tincture.  The  extract  should 
therefore  bear  relation  to  the  tincture.  It  would  not  take  many 
pharmaceutical  experiments  to  determine  what  proportion  of  extract 
the  official  tincture  would  yield  on  evaporation,  and  it  would  be 
pharmaceutical^  very  easy  to  add  to  this  extract  so  that  the  one- 
eighth  or  the  one-fourth  of  a  grain,  as  the  case  may  be,  would  repre- 
sent 5  minims  of  the  tincture. 
STROPHANTHIN. 
We  have  also  made  a  series  of  experiments  with  commercial 
strophanthin,  furnished  us  by  Dr.  Charles  Rice. 
The  solution  used  in  experiments  1  and  2  was  made  by  dissolving 
01  gramme  of  the  strophanthin  in  100  c.c.  of  water.  1  c.c.  of 
it,  therefore,  represented  0  001  gramme  of  the  strophanthin,  or  1 
milligramme.  The  solution  was  always  thrown  directly  into  the 
jugular  vein. 
Experiment  1. — Dog;  weight,  20-5  kilos. 
2  c.c.  of  the  solution  caused  a  rise  of  65  mm.  in  four  minutes, 
which  was  maintained  for  eight  minutes,  when  2  c.c.  more  of  the 
solution  were  given,  followed  by  a  fatal  arrest  of  the  heart's  action 
in  one  and  one-half  minutes. 
