Excerpt from A Textbook of Pharmacology and Therapeutics: Or the Action of Drugs in Health and Disease The great interest of pharmacology does not lie in its purely bio logical aspects, however, but in its relation to the treatment of disease. As long as we are ignorant of how a remedy. Acts in any disease, the treatment is purely empirical; when the mode of action is understood, much greater accuracy can be attained in the treatment. The object of pharmacology is to explain the mysteries of therapeutics, whether the subject is studied at the bedside or in the laboratory. The exact way in which a drug changes the diseased condition can often be followed only imperfectly in man, and recourse must be had to experiments on healthy or diseased animals to elucidate the principles on which it should be employed. In addition, the experimental investigation of new chemical bodies has very frequently demonstrated properties which are of therapeutic value; almost all the new drugs introduced in the last half-century have found their way to the wards through the experimental laboratories. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.