Abstract
THERE is required no little courage on the part of both writer and publisher to issue a book with this forbidding title, which to the layman brings memories of the nauseous ransom paid for release from disabilities, and to the medical man renews the griefs of “lectures on materia medica at 8 o'clock on a winter's morning” which Darwin found “something fearful to remember.” To those who are not repelled by the exterior, however, we can promise much enjoyment from the perusal of this volume, which is written with the same distinction of literary style and with the same felicity of illustration as marked the author's “Principia Therapeutica.” He writes for the educated layman, and, avoiding the technical pitfalls with which medicine is so bestrewn, gives a clear view of the principles on which treatment must rest. Commencing with a short historical review of the deductive medicine of the “systems,” among which he places that curious survival homoeopathy, he passes quickly to the definition of his subject, noting by the way the etymological connection between drug and dry, and then discusses the general aim of drug-giving and the grounds on which it is based. Here, as throughout, the author draws many analogies between familiar physical phenomena and the action of drugs, and attempts to dispel the mysticism in which therapeutics is still involved to the lay mind.
Drugs and the Drug Habit.
By Dr. Harrington Sainsbury. (New Library of Medicine.) Pp. xv + 307. (London: Methuen and Co., n.d.) Price 7s. 6d. net.
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Drugs and the Drug Habit . Nature 81, 271 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/081271a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/081271a0