Handbook of materia medica, pharmacy, and therapeutics : including the physiological action of drugs, the special therapeutics of disease, official and practical pharmacy, and minute directions for prescription writing / by Sam'l O.L. Potter.

  • Potter, Samuel O. L. (Samuel Otway Lewis), 1846-1914.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of materia medica, pharmacy, and therapeutics : including the physiological action of drugs, the special therapeutics of disease, official and practical pharmacy, and minute directions for prescription writing / by Sam'l O.L. Potter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    logical action of the important medicaments so far as established. What has hitherto been the conviction of but a few, is daily growing into a fixed canon of professional belief, that physiological experimentation with drugs must be the basis of their therapeutical employment, and that all real advance towards the establishment of therapeutics as a science, must be made upon the lines laid down by Haller, namely—drug-proving upon the healthy human organism. Still, in the words of Brown-Sequard, “Therapeutics will cease to be empirical, only when this last kind of knowledge shall be fully obtained ; ”—but its fulness will never be fully realized, unless the results have been thoroughly considered with full regard to the differences due to the action of drugs in different doses on the human organism in health and disease. A thoroughly-prepared materia medica of half-a-dozen standard drugs, such as Aconite, Arsenic, Belladonna, Mercury, Opium and Quinine, based upon their actions and uses in different doses and under different states of the organism, would be of more real value to the physician who wishes to do his work accurately and with his eyes open, than all the con- tents of the dispensatories, plus the entire literature of the “new reme- dies,” and every symptom in the ten quarto volumes of the largely dis- credited and partly repudiated homoeopathic Materia Medica. If our medical students would each devote but one month, of his annual college vacation, to the personal investigation of some one feature of the action of some one drug, under such safe-guards against error as would secure the acceptance of the resulting observations,—what a mine of therapeutic gold would soon yield its solid truth to eager eyes ! Formally laid down by Haller in 1755, cultivated to some extent by Alexander in 1768, Crumpe in 1793, Thommassini, Curtis, etc.,—urged by John Hunter, Sir Thomas Watson, Dr. King Chambers, and many other lumi- naries of the medical profession,—the scientifically guarded proving of drugs on the human organism has lain, like the similar work of Jenner, neglected these many years, waiting for another Koch to re-inaugurate the work. CONSTITUENTS OF VEGETABLE DRUGS. The Constituents of Vegetable Drugs may be classified as Soluble and l7isoluble, the first group containing those ingredients which may be extracted by suitable menstrua, the second such as resist the action of all ordinary solvents. z? • • The Soluble Constituents comprise both Inert and Active Princi- ples, the inert being chiefly starch, gum and pectin, which may be readily