the digestive capacity of the race has long been taxed. Intelligence has thus been introduced into a realm for ages unguardedly open to ignorance and recklessness.
The science did not long remain merely critical: the development of chemistry and experimental physiology created a positive opportunity. Given, in a word, this or that condition,—a disease, a symptom, or pain itself,—cannot an agent be devised capable of combating it? Cocaine, the antipyretics, the various glandular preparations, and serum therapy are among the affirmative replies that witness the constructive possibilities of pharmacodynamics. The strictly experimental science, thus richly rewarded, has reinforced physiological conceptions independently at work in the effort to rationalize materia medica and therapeutics. Instead of naive reliance upon poly-pharmacy, diseases and their attendant symptoms have now been divided into some half-dozen provisional classes, subject to continuous revision, according to the method of attack to which they are at the moment most accessible. There are those that drugs actually combat,—syphilis and malaria, for example; next, the self-limited diseases, in the course of which therapeutic measures may be used to avert dangerous symptomatic consequences,—as bathing reduces the temperature in typhoid, as chloroform checks convulsions in strychnine poisoning, as morphine relieves mere pain. There are those in which the body's natural methods of defense may be hastened or strengthened, as through serum therapy; those in which our only reliance thus far is on environment or suggestion; and finally, those in which summary relief may be had through the surgeon. A great change, this, from indiscriminate and largely ignorant dosing! The body diseased is indeed like a city besieged. No single form of military manoeuvre can be prescribed as a sure defense; now a sally from the main gate discomfits the enemy; again, a diversion from some unexpected quarter; sometimes the inhabitants conserve their strength in the hope of wearing the enemy out, feeding the soldiers at the expense of all the others; and sometimes, as in tuberculosis, there is no hope except by actually decamping, leaving a vacant Moscow to a cheated foe.
In the university, pharmacology has critically an extensive, creatively an apparently boundless, opportunity. The medical student can at best browse the field here and there. But as was found to be the case with experimental physiology, he cannot forego that opportunity, limited though it be. The young doctor's therapeutic environment is still distinctly unfavorable. He is exposed to danger, front and rear. The traditions of the profession are in the main crudely empiric; they embody a "pop-gun pharmacy, hitting now the malady and again the patient, the doctor himself not knowing which."[1] Besides, the practitioner is subjected, year in, year out, to the steady bombardment of the unscrupulous manufacturer, persuasive to the uncritical, on the principle that "what I tell you three times is true."[2] Against bad
