AmiigustPi905!m'}        Structural  Plant  Relationships.  391 
Eclectic  thought  comprehended  the  situation  in  the  latter  part  of 
the  last  century,  and  through  clinical  experimentation  came  into  pos- 
session of  a  great,  rich  field  which  the  Regular  physician  had  un- 
wittingly relinquished.  It  turned  toward  the  evolution  of  a  standard 
form  of  clean  remedies,  as  nearly  devoid  of  common  plant  dirt  as 
possible,  which  should  parallel  the  natural  drugs  as  a  whole,  not  be 
a  fragment  only.  The  demands  of  exact  Eclectic  medication  in 
which  small  doses  of  natural,  preserved,  soluble  drug  structures  were 
to  be  used  to  meet  definite  symptoms,  made  necessary  the  greatest  pos- 
sible exactness  and  the  kindliest  manipulation  looking  to  the  perfec- 
tion of  these  preparations.  The  fathers  foresaw  wisely  that  on  this 
materia  medica  the  life  of  Eclecticism  depended.  By  the  use  of  this 
materia  medica  came  their  opportunity  to  do  well  their  work. 
The  Evolution  of  Structural  Remedies. — The  one  school  in  Ameri- 
can medicine  that  has  given  its  thought,  its  culture,  its  aim  in  the 
treatment  of  disease  by  structural  vegetable  remedies  is  acknowl- 
edged to  be  the  Eclectic  school.  Whilst  free  to  use  all  remedial 
agents,  be  they  animal,  vegetable  or  mineral,  its  great  field  has  been 
the  development  of  our  native  American  drugs.  It  has  taken  freely 
from  the  discoveries  of  the  Regular  and  the  Homoeopathic  schools, 
crediting  them  therefor ;  it  has  no  less  freely  given  to  them.  The 
ambition  of  the  Eclectic  has  been  to  investigate,  to  discover,  to 
demonstrate.,  With  this  worthy  object,  as  the  various  American 
drugs  were  investigated,  the  therapeutical  values  of  these  drugs  were 
given  to  the  world.  They  were  placed  before  the  profession  under 
the  true  names  of  the  plants  yielding  them.  Text-books,  materia 
medicas,  works  on  practice,  descriptive  both  of  the  drugs  and  their 
action  in  disease,  were  written.  Thus,  the  facts  evolved  were  ever 
at  the  command  of  men  of  other  schools,  whose  investigating  care 
was  chiefly  given  in  other  directions  and  whose  study  was  chiefly  di- 
rected towards  other  fields.  The  evolution  of  these  Eclectic  remedies 
has  been  clinical,  experimental  in  human  disease  expressions  (not 
on  animals  in  health),  by  a  rule  which  necessitated  a  long  and  cir- 
cumspect study  of  each  remedy.  It  is  a  clinical  furthering  of  the 
empiricism  of  the  past  in  which  as  a  rule  the  natural  energetic  struc- 
ture of  a  drug  dissolved  in  an  appropriate  preservative  menstruum, 
separated  from  inert  matters  as  much  as  possible,  is  viewed  as  a 
whole y  and  then  used  as  a  whole.  Due  credit  is  given  isolated  sub- 
stances in  their  useful  places.   Indeed,  the  credit  of  discovering  those 
