Page:Botanic drugs, their materia medica, pharmacology, and therapeutics (1917).djvu/14

 effort will be made to present herein a careful record of data upon such botanic drugs as seem to hold a respected and warranted place in medical literature. The large number of botanic drugs recognized in the pharmacopeias of the leading nations testifies to the importance of this class of remedial agencies in medical practice. Therefore, the list of such plant remedies discussed herein will not be pedantically limited.

Frankly favoring the development of our own American drug industries, indigenous American plant remedies will be quite generally noticed, even though it must be conceded that many of them are of but minor importance, so far as we know at present. Some gentlemen may consider it as detracting from the scientific value of a medical work to enter into a discussion of minor drugs, and from a certain point of view such a criticism is justified; but, and the author realizes the fact most acutely, it is quite impossible, in our present state of knowledge, to prepare a truly scientific text upon the subject matter here undertaken. Hence, this book pretends to nothing more than what it actually is, and does not pose in the light of the scientific exactitude illumining a modern text book upon bacteriology or operating-room technic, nor can it do so.

Nevertheless it is not markedly to our credit that the botanic remedies, the ones longest known, some of them for thirty centuries, are the class least understood in the whole range of curative resource. So, then, a book upon this subject must, of necessity, be marked by numerous inconclusive passages and but semi-scientific divisions.