As a medical practitioner of nearly thirty years' experience, it is but natural that the author should stress the evidence derived from the clinical side. Yet notwithstanding this bent of the clinician, one in active practice meets with so many disappointments from drugs in his management of cases of illness, that he comes to welcome—and hope for— something definite in drug action something empiric experience fails in giving and that laboratory research alone can supply.
Yet it must be admitted that, as regards the botanic drugs, there is no considerable volume of laboratory research recorded. Only a few botanic remedies have had adequate pharmacologic study, and even some of this research remains inconclusive or but partially worked out. So far as may be, the discussion of remedies in this volume will be upon a scientific basis. Wherein such data is not available, the author will call upon clinical literature and his own experience and observation, frankly conceding the errancy liable to mar such methods of conclusion.
Believing that the proponents of a drug usually overstate the case, and that a multitude of claims regarding its efficacy gradually grow like barnacles upon its literature, this book will present only sifted conclusions. There has been a wonderful accumulation of therapeutic junk carried from one book upon materia medica into another one, and so on from book to book. With the best of intention to avoid this irrational method of literary composition, this book will still pass along some of that sort of thing; but, let us hope, a minimum of it.
No theories, systems or preconceived schemes
