Einführung in die experimentelle Therapie

Abstract

UNTIL the middle of last century therapeutics was a purely clinical study, the physician treating his patients on purely empirical grounds and without any clearly conceived idea of how his measures affected the course of the disease. About fifty years ago the experimental study of the action of drugs was taken up by a number of investigators, and the school of experimental pharmacology succeeded to the ancient study of materia medica. The benefits accruing to medicine from this school are recognised by all who have followed the course of therapeutics in the last half-century; but its members in some degree have stood aloof from the great movement which, beginning with the discovery of pathogenic organisms, has progressed to the discovery of their antidotes in the antitoxins, and to the treatment of disease by these last. The workers on therapeutics who have approached the subject from the bacteriological laboratory have accordingly assumed a new and distinct title for it-experimental therapeutics-and show a tendency to broaden its borders to include such work as that which has culminated in Ehrlich's discovery of the new anti-syphilitic specific. Yet the methods followed by Ehrlich are exactly similar in essentials to those of Schmiedeberg or von Mering in their researches on hypnotics; and the fact that the former was seeking a remedy to act on the treponema in the tissues, and the others for a remedy for the over-excited nerve cell, does not seem to justify their subjects being classed under different headings.

Einführung in die experimentelle Therapie.

By Prof. M. Jacoby. Pp. vii + 180. (Berlin: J. Springer, 1910.) Price 5 marks.