Japan’s Emperor Akihito Abdicates Throne, the First in 200 years

The employment of drugs in ordinary or in large doses for their physical, chemic, or physiologic action is a procedure so well established in therapeutics, and so well borne out in the common experience of all ages, that a defence of such a rational use of remedies is not necessary.

The question of the natural limitations of such a line of therapy is a pertinent one, however.

From time to time new theories have arisen, tending either to limit or to eliminate such a use of drugs. These theories or systems of therapeutics usually possess some degree of truth and one-sided merit, but they unite in a superlative elaboration of the symptomatology of disease processes as a guide in the selection of the indicated remedy, and they minimize the known physiologic actions as an indication towards the selection of the proper drug to meet the pathologic change underlying the symptomatology.

Like the systems and theories of other branches of science, these well-meant efforts need not meet with pedantic condemnation, especially since certain abuses and overstatements have been corrected and our therapeutics tempered by reason of the discussions engendered by them. What, then, are the limitations naturally surrounding our use of remedies in the usual doses of the books and for their generally recognized physiologic actions?