h you have been trained, now, of course, is the time for you to
know it.

There seems to be a widespread impression--an assumption--that the day of
the drug is over--that the therapeutic of the future are to be concerned
along with hygiene and sanitation, with physical exercise, diet, and
mechanical operations. The very word "drug" has come to have an
objectionable connection that did not belong to it fifty years ago. Even
some of the druggists themselves, it seems to me, are a little ashamed of
the drug part of their occupation. Their places of business appear to be
news-agencies, refreshment parlors, stationery stores--the drugs are "on
the side," or rather in the rear. Sometimes, I am told, the proprietors of
these places know nothing at all about pharmacy, but employ a prescription
clerk who is a capable pharmacist. Here the druggist has stepped down from
his former position as the manager of a business and has become a servant.
All of which looks to me as if the pharmacist himself might be beginning
to accept the valuation that some people are putting upon his services to
the community.

Now these things affect me, not as a physician nor as a pharmacist, for I
am neither, but they do touch me as a student of physics and chemistry and
as one whose business and pleasure it has been for many years to watch the
development of these and other sciences. The fact that I am addressing you
this evening may be taken, I suppose, as evidence that you may be
interested in this point of view. The action of most substances on the
human organism is a function of their chemical constitution. Has that
chemical constitution changed? It is one of the most astonishing
discoveries of our age that many, perhaps all, substances undergo
spontaneous disintegration, giving rise to the phenomena now well known as
"radio-activity." No substances ordinarily known and used in pharmacy,
however, possess this quality in measurable degree, and we have no reason
to suppose that the alkaloids, for instance, or the salts of potash or
iron, differ today in any respect from those of a century ago. How about
the other factor in the reaction--the human organism and its properties?
That our bodily properties have changed in the past admits of no doubt. We
have developed up to the point where we are at present. Here, however,
evolution seems to have left us, and it is now devoting its attention
exclusively to our mental and moral progress. Judging from what