Thus a reaction seemed to have set in, in favor of plants being used as medicines. Referring to the use of the Bilberry (Vaccinium Myrtillus) as a remedy in Typhoid fever and other infectious diseases of the intestine—a paper read by Dr. Max M. Bernstein, M.B., before the Hunterian Society of London and published in the British Medical Journal for 7th February, 1903,—Sir James Sawyer, M. D., London, F.R.C.P., Senior Consulting Physician to the Queen's Hospital; and Ex-Professor of Medicine in the Queen's College, Birmingham, wrote in the British Medical Journal for February, 4 28th, 1903:—"Long have some of us dwelt with affection, and with hope of finding modern uses for some old drugs which were being lost to sight and to memory in the limbus of the past, and perhaps not without some practical success, upon the archaeology of our Medicinal "Simples," upon the histories and lore, upon the forms, virtues, and renown of many old-time Medicinal plants, upon plants called simples because each of them has been held to
enshrine its particular curative virtue, and so to furnish a simple remedy for some symptom of disease, or for some individual morbid manifestation. Perhaps we have loved to walk, as Evelyn did, "into a large garden, esteemed for its furniture one of the fairest, especially for simples;" or perhaps we have followed our own Garth, "when simpling on the flowery hills he strayed."
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"True is it to-day as when Sir Thomas Watson so declared a third of a century ago that 'the greatest gap in the science of Medicine is to be found in its final and supreme stage—the stage of therapeutics.' Therapeutics advances by our increasing knowledge of the nature of morbid processes and of the physiological effects of remedies, and also by studying again many a good old drug by the light of later scientific methods and also by judicious selection from the traditions of popular medicine. Such selection gave us Digitalis."
Dr. Ischirch, Professor of Practical Chemistry in the University of Berne, is reported in the Lancet of 2nd October, 1909, to have said:—
"We may assuredly hope that medicine, when it has thoroughly ruined its digestion with synthetical remedies and
