Handbook of Pharmacology.

The advance of biology and the development of medical pedagogy have gradually separated pharmacology as a representative of pure science from therapeutics, which represents an application of science to the cure of disease. Therapeutics must be based largely on pharmacology, but its conclusions must be largely indirect, because while pharmacology deals with the normal organism, therapeutics is applied to an abnormal organism which may react to the therapeutic agent in a manner different from the behavior of the normal organism. Further, pharmacology draws its facts almost wholly from animal experimentation, and hence arrives at the action of drugs on the human organism mainly by inference. In approaching the consideration of a book devoted to pharmacology, we must bear in mind that the scientific treatment of the subject demands that therapeutic inferences be subsidiary. Most teachers of the subject still aim to connect pharmacology with medicine, and most text-books have conserved