390  Structural  Plant  Relationships.        { Ank5Sst,  u&?m' 
pervert  thought  in  the  Regular  school,  until  we  observe  that  medical 
nihilism,  too  often  the  result  of  such  medication,  is  fostered  by  con- 
tinued disappointment  in  directions  where  structures,  not  fragments, 
dominate  a  drug. 
The  great  mass  of  organic  remedial  agents  has  no  one  dominating 
definite  structure  capable  of  either  isolation  or  of  yielding,  by 
chemical  destruction,  definite  ultimates.  In  them  the  natural  struc- 
tures, without  formula  or  equation,  stand  supreme  in  the  face  of  the 
aggressive  chemist,  and  both  his  constructive  and  destructive  art. 
In  the  materia  medica  of  intercellular  structures,  no  one  chemically- 
made  fragment  that  can  be  broken  out  parallels  the  drug  as  a  whole, 
if  one  knows  the  whole  drug.  Indeed,  with  the  vast  majority  of 
valuable  vegetable  remedies,  chemistry  is  inadequate  to  even  help 
identify  a  drug  through  the  reactions  of  any  known  quality  pos- 
sessed by  either  its  chemically-made  or  chemically-isolated  frag- 
ments. Scores  of  plant  preparations  that  for  half  a  century  have 
been  valued  as  remedies,  may  be  mixed ;  and  no  chemist  in  the 
world  can,  by  his  art,  identify  any  one  drug  of  the  mixture,  or  by 
means  of  a  formula  or  equation  or  reaction,  point  to  any  therapeuti- 
cal constituent  present  in  the  mixture.  Inter-structural  compounds 
exist,  by  their  well-known  qualities  are  they  established  in  pharmacy 
and  therapy,  but  a  blank  are  they  to  the  chemist's  art. 
The  time  of  thousands  of  workers  has  been  spent  during  the  past 
century  in  the  hope  that  a  single  thing  picked  out  of  a  mighty 
whole  can  parallel  the  original  structure.  A  worthy  ambition  is 
this,  but  one  that  led  to  the  greatest  disappointment  this  writer  ever 
experienced  in  a  loved  scientific  theory,  which  thirty  years  ago  held 
his  enthusiastic  care,  and  thirty  years  ago  was  sadly  relinquished. 
Unquestionable  evidence  taught  that  fragments  created  out  of  drugs 
by  chemistry  do  not  parallel  the  natural  intermolecular  structures 
that  establish  drugs  as  remedies. 
Much  of  the  present  discouragement  of  Regular  physicians  is 
surely  due  to  the  use  of  fragments  only.  Unwisely  they  have  ig- 
nored the  claims  of  plant  structures  which  in  themselves  are  valuable 
in  medicine,  but  are  neglected  and  discarded  because  the  test  tube 
and  reagent  of  the  chemist  cannot  create  from  them  bodies  like  unto 
the  poisonous  alkaloids,  atropine,  strychnine,  morphine.  These  men 
seek  the  hurricane  ;  the  still,  small  voice  has  no  part  in  such  medi- 
cation. 
