Abstract
THIS work is a reprint of the Croonian Lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, London, in 1889. Whatever Dr. Brunton writes is sure to be interesting, and the present lectures have lost none of their lucidity or freshness though three years have elapsed since they were before the medical profession. It is hardly necessary to say that the subject is one with which Dr. Lauder Brunton is eminently fitted to deal, and the non-medical reader will be convinced when he has read the volume that medicine and therapeutics are far from being the inexact sciences they were not many years ago. The elementary nature of some of the early pages will be understood when it is remembered that the audience before which the lectures were originally given consisted in a large measure of men who had learnt chemistry before the days of Crookes, Lockyer, and Mendeleeff. It was necessary that the author should lead them through a brief survey of the chief facts and theories relating to atoms and molecules until the more difficult subject of the composition, constitution, and methods of union of organic radicles is reached. This is done in an admirably clear summary, assisted by those apt illustrations drawn from every-day life for which Dr. Brunton is so well-known. Our new drngs are now made by the chemist; so great has been the advance of organic chemistry, that the pharmacologist has hard work to keep pace with all the new combinations that issue from the laboratory. But the two classes of investigators, the chemists and the experimental therapeutists, have at least gone hand in hand so far, that it is now possible to judge the action of a drug by its composition. This, however, as Dr. Brunton points out, is not a rule without exception. There are many drugs which behave in unexpected ways; they no doubt, in the future, will be brought into harmony with laws of nature yet to be discovered. At present it is not possible to prophesy the physiological action of a chemical compound with that mathematical accuracy which enables astronomers to foretell eclipses; pharmacology is yet, and perhaps always will be, an experimental science.
An Introduction to Modern Therapeutics.
By T. Lauder Brunton, &c. (London: Macmillan and Co.,1892.)
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H., W. An Introduction to Modern Therapeutics. Nature 46, 172 (1892). https://doi.org/10.1038/046172a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/046172a0