is now
going on upon the continent of Europe, much remains to be accomplished.
But there is no reason to believe that if Caesar or Hannibal had taken a
dose of opium, or ipecac, or aspirin, the effect would have been different
from that experienced today by one of you. This is what a physicist or a
chemist would expect. If the action of a drug on the organism is chemical,
and if neither the drug nor the organism has changed, the action must be
the same. If we still desire to bring about the action and if there is no
better way to do it, we must use the drug, and there is still need for the
druggist. As a matter of fact, the number of drugs at your disposal today
is vastly greater than ever before, largely owing to the labor, and the
ingenuity, of the analytical chemist. And there are still great classes of
compounds of whose existence the chemist is assured, but which he has not
even had time to form, much less to investigate. Among these may lurk
remedies more valuable than any at our disposal today. It does not look,
at any rate, as if the druggist were going to be driven out of business
from lack of stock, whether we regard quantity or variety. To what, then,
must we attribute the growth of the feeling that the treatment of disease
by the administration of drugs is on the decline? From the standpoint of a
layman it seems to be due to two facts, or at least to have been strongly
affected by them: (1) The discovery and rapid development of other
therapeutic measures, such as those dependent on surgical methods, or on
the use of immunizing serums, or on manipulations such as massage, or on
diet, or even on mental suggestion; and (2) the very increase in the
number and variety of available drugs alluded to above, which has
introduced to the public many new and only partially tried substances, the
results of whose use has often been unexpectedly injurious, including a
considerable number of new habit-forming drugs whose ravages are becoming
known to the public.

The development of therapeutic measures that are independent of drugs has
been coincident with popular emancipation from the mere superstition of
drug-administration. The older lists of approved remedies were loaded with
items that had no curative properties at all, except by suggestion. They
were purely magical--the thumb-nails of executed criminals, the hair of
black cats, the ashes of burned toads and so on. Even at this moment your
pharmacopoeia contains score