extract our medicines from the natural products in which they are contained, we seek to make for ourselves such substances as shall possess the particular action we desire."[1]
This method had been pursued since the time when Professors Crum Brown and Fraser were able to demonstrate the connection between chemical constitution and physiological action. With the help of the advanced chemistry of modern times, an attempt to establish rational therapeutics was being made by the leading pharmacologists of the world. Thus the employment of inorganic salts and chemical principles obtained from the vegetable kingdom, which had been much in vogue about half a century ago, was being gradually abandoned in favor of derivatives obtained from coal-tar and various alcohols. As was once pointed out by the authors of the Extra Pharmacopoeia, " the place in medical treatment, of quinine and morphine, the two mainstays of the medical practitioners of twenty years ago, is in a great measure filled by antipyrin, antifebrin, phenacetin, exalgine, and salicylate of sodium on the one hand, and by sulphonal, tetronal, chloral, &c, on the other."[2] The day was eagerly looked forward to when the articles of our organic materia medica were to be supplanted by the creations of the chemist.
Analogy however is no safe guide in science. So Brunton's comparison of the different articles of Materia Medica to the weapons of the different geologic periods, is, to say the least, very fallacious. There is something like what may be called "Fashion in medicine." It is due to this "fashion," that some of the good old remedies are labelled "out of fashion." For long it was not considered fashionable to use crude herbs. Synthetic remedies were the fashion of the day. It is not only the great war which is now raging in Europe that has made the pendulum of fashion swing from one extreme to the other, but the oscillation was visible even a considerable time before the outbreak of the War.
