Presented to the Section ria Medica, Pharmacy and Thera- peu gre at ben Forty-e nee peel Meeting of the American Med- ; Association, held at Philadelphia, Pa., June 1-4, 1897. : “ BY WILLIAM TRELEASE, Sc.D DIRECTOR OF THE MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. ST. LOUIS, MO. he REPRINTED FROM THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, SEPTEMBER 4, 1 MEDICAL BOTANY. BY WILLIAM TRELEASE, Sc.D. Prior to emergence from its nameless,barbaric state, ace was undoubtedly versed in botany of 2 It is said that the mongoose, when bitten by a cobra, runs at on ce into the jungle and seeks out a New Haven in 1843, and on opening it I found it to every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the ub- ject assigned me, “Medical Botany,” the titles of which were “Lobelia Inflata,” “Capsicum Annum” and “ Myrica Cerifera.” Lobelia and calomel were men- tioned on nearly every page and appeared in the titles of many of the articles. It is probably unnecessary P gists and prescription clerks, of os nars and fluid ran and of laboratory synthes Few, indeed, e the physi cians who can m ee a , teaokawe or an alkaloid salt as well or as cheaply as the druggist the manufacturing chemist, and, under needful pestriotions, the latter are turned to by the balers s clothing, is more and more something to be ordered se arae “igh than a legitimate subject for home manufactu o it has come that the study of medion botany then to the medical student. He, indeed, is expected to know his botany well. He need not be a vegetable possibly be certain lines he must be a botanist. As a sea we find studies of this kind omitted from the medical curriculum proper and given place in that branch of ee rage which has ye to have a name an place —pharm Whether tanghe 3 in the iaieal school or the school af Pe , or the school of botany, the knowledge is of the most practical and useful character. A knowl- edge of the gape of plants will very often lead the P b inguish one certain plant in all its forms from all 4 other plants. Every few years the drug trade is exercised over substitutes offered more or iets honestly y ors and jobbers. It is only a short time since cascara sagrada, the bark of Rhamnus Purshiana, was replaced very considerably by the bark of a related species, Rhamnus Californica, the latter of much inferior quality. It is also only a few years since the trade journals contained an extensive description of the substitution of the roots of Polygala alba for the senega snakeroot, 5 ly ae Senega. Not many years o, a sample of tans ich was submitted by a large wholesale fess proved, probably as the result of a clerical blunder, to be pansy. The direct solution of oreblens of identity like the rasadltne | is “da closest link between hay any and phar- macy, the most obvious medical bota Itisa ee of the study of vegetable pharmacognosy. The las instance mentioned is a very simple one. The me fest tyro could detect the mistake and guess pretty closely at the cause for it; but in the other casesa discrimina- tion between the things to be compared proved decid- oe more difficult, s they come to the wholesaler and the manufac- fruit and seed rarely, as in the case of opiu are the active eaucinke collected to any eet ex tate freed from t f the plant which produce em. Hence, in the great ENS of cases, the medical botaniet § em expected to oe name cer- tain parts of fairly well-known plan It has, unfortunately for this ison been the habit of descriptive botanists to aim at as brief a diagnosis of each species as possible, and to use those characters which most surely and most readily serve to separate it from its congeners; orelse, as is the case with much mod- ern work, what are felt to be the less aici and con- sequently the surest and most permanent ecseaays have been taken as the ‘aie of classification of the more obvious features being left satiealy ae 5 scribed. The result is that a person who uses the ordinary manuals of botany, unless he is quite expert colleges, being based on and preparatory to the use of these manuals, is saudned to a study of the characters employed in the Medical oeay. if well done, must start from a somewhat different standpoint. It by no means fol- lows that a plant oe can be determined by aid of th y nted era, like the oaks and plums, the trees and shrubs of our flora may be know n with quite as much certainty in the winter when destit tute of flower and fruit, and this ca aa Oty is — only as the result of indi- vidual observation and investigation, based primarily on a peer bien ‘of the species derived while their palisade cells in the leaf, the occurrence or absence o 6 pubescence and superficial glands, and the structure he it is necessary to test the degree of lignification of certain cell-walls, to determine the nature of secretions, and to examine, both morphologically and ee the ao contained in the s specimen, which is com- pared in each of these respects with duthents stan sds 8. china this practical botany of medicines Le a more or less intelligent conception of bota classification, but is itself the app feation of a etal kill. Quite teeetation. ot many years since another successful teacher of the same subject laid down the essential thing as being “that the course of specimens illustrating the same things, and closin Se his course by an exercise in which a lot of mix 7 unnamed material is placed on the lecture table and sorted out by the professor and students, the charac- ters utilized jn indicated step o step during this exercise. Here, if anywhere, object teaching is essential, — each of these a is taught as a series of objec lessons. Gross characters are made out by the aid St the naked eye and ‘simple magnifying pe ee but for others the compound microscope is brougbt into req- uisition and some of the pharmaceutic schools have as a part of egular be compared w Primarily he is called on to ognize this ‘dontity or difference in comparison ag the plant that the material is supposed to represent. it be different the question as to what it really is is oe a secondary one, and as his knowledge increases e becomes more and more able to answer these accessory questions. good description is more available for use than a the time is ing wh equipped with manuals employing the characters 8 which are available in the class of material that must be studied. Perhaps the progress of American sys- tematic botany has been retarded more by the easily acquired habit of naming new specimens by matching them in the herbarium than in any other way; and the cing the limitation of species. Hence a specimen is always potentially better than a dese ription, since the former is the thing itself, while the latter is only a medical botany, as in general botany, the herbarium is of prime importance. he medical or pharmaceutic herbarium should differ from the general herbarium in containing only a of a million s The specimens contained in this eohioal herbarivim should be perfect from all points of view:—goo the sense of the ordinary botanist as representing the technical characters which rbarium needed by freshly gathered ea but dit ato 9 _ druggists’ journals that “the pharmaceutic profession li to the then proposed New York garden). As scien- tifie principles become more and more extensively incorporated into the practice of pharmacy, there is increased recognition of the necessity for a practical Perea with the sources of our drugs. This oes not of necessity imply an extensive knowledge of theoretic botany, desirable as that is, but a thorough personal acquaintance with medicinal plants is of the eatest value to him who must daily discriminate against substitutions, eres tions, inferior varieties and collections and deteriorated sa mples. The ideal Bipbortanity for culti tvating this fee Me is in the botanic garden, where we have _ brought together for immediate comparison n the doub under con- sideration in a living state, ae where the characters thus observed can be followed up closely in the her- bart ; Oa aa i 8 an appearance which the specimen under study may have undergone during its preparation will be likely to be matched by a corresponding change in oe Hands, and besides the museum material here to, which is most readily utilized by the S eeivnice if p in j iate ion with the herb: kept boxed in im connection ar ium tesa a set of histologic oa aye ought to = ing not only 1 ues of each pr pogo can be made from the fragmentary drug, o hak g ood sections are often citeled with difficulty, while ‘the mode of fragmentation is some- times characteristi Today nearly al students are taught not only to observe, but to record their observations, both in writing and pee of sketches. The allo al bot- 10 anist, perhaps more than most others, is likely to be benefited by forming this habit. A sketch made from a comparison with it more certain. I therefore sketch the essentials of every preparation so preserved, and while the matter is fresh in one’s mind rief memorandum is easily written in connection with the sketch, describing differences between related things that may be transient in the slide or liable to be overlooke Medical botany, therefore, as a technical study for the manufacturin g pharmacist and collector, and to a less extent for i My dispensing draggict, but hardly for the medical man, in my mind is really a minute acquaintance with each plant used in : auedielie with each its e form . whic ey are any. fore this point, if he know the meaning of a generic and a specific name, of a natant family and a variety, he is enough of a botanist to do his work well. To the physieian of today, medical brag errs only a few years ago seemed to be passing hands, is returning in twofold form, Hat it is doubtful if the great majority of physicians are justified in dipping very far into it. Occasionally oe by eating certain toadstools, or roots of a few umbel- lifers, demands a certain amount of alana knowl f this poisoning is as practically useful as the actual Sopot of the soe which has caused it. The dermatologist, more than the general physician, is called. on to raccanin causes for dermal manifesta- 11 tions which he often traces to the use of food of one sort or another, which in some cases the idiosyncrasy of the patient reacts to in rather a marked way, an it is only a few years since a professor in the Harvard Medical School ‘published an exhaustive treatise on _ the plants which — such effects. A few plants, like the poison ivy, are very pronounced estntaaki irri- very m know the effect of pertain drugs, ther than to have a botanic knowledge of the irritant. With the growing Leabledes of bacteria, coud a more directly necessary branch of medic tany seems to be opening up. It is not sates for the ad. only after a_bacte poser examination sen ie Widal test = typhoid fever now has me into general use, n the case of cholera and a onihieea it is, I believe. patient recognized that an easily made pure culture of bacteria from the patient affords the surest and i quickest Eatanaation as to the positive occurrence o Today I suppose that there is not a good medical bacteriologic laboratory. The teaching needed for this branch of aeciont: botany, like that needed for the older medical botany, which is now more properly regarded as pharmaceutic botany, ought to be of the most directly practical kind. A knowledge of meth- ods firs Some bacteria, the ordinary aerobic species, are so enuy isolated and grown in pure cultures that the eans of doing this ought to be at the hand of ag d sri though I observe that certain boards 12 health are now undertaking to supply the apparatus and culture media needed for diphtheria work, so as to reduce the practitioner’s part to the minimum of manual manipulation. The preparation and examin- ation of slides offers little difficulty to the medical student who is already equipped with a knowledge of work. Here, as in pharmaceutic botany, the reference to authentic descriptions and authentic material be- mes more and more necessary in proportion as one mo and more free the routine of bot xamina- tion, so the exhaustive study of the etiology of any germ disease is passing more and more from the phy- sician to the medical bacteriologist who specializes in cian is obliged to make. The difference is in degree, however, rather than in kind.