USEFUL DRUGS PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION AND SUPERVISION OF THE COUNCIL ON PHARMACY AND CHEMISTRY OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION A List of Drugs Selected to Supply the Demand for a Less Extensive Materia Medica and Especially to Serve as a Basis for the Teaching of Materia Medica and Therapeutics, and for Examinations on These Subjects by State Licensing Boards, with a Discussion of their Actions, Uses and Dosage. Second Edition PRESS OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION 535 North Dearborn Street, Chicago 1917 MICROFILMED [AUTHORITY TO USE FOR COMMENT THE PHARMACOPEIA OF THE ACCURACY OF ANY TRANSLATION OF THE OFFICIAL WEIGHTS COPYRIGHT, 1916 PREFACE It has long been recognized that the multiplicity of drugs and preparations of drugs presented to the attention of the medical profession is an evil. Leaving out of account the articles described in the National Formulary and the vast number described in dispensatories and similar unofficial compilations, the number of drugs and preparations described in the Pharmacopeia alone is far too large for intelligent practical use. Of even greater importance is the well-known fact that a considerable proportion of Pharmacopeial drugs and preparations are superfluous or worthless. Repeated attempts to eliminate such articles from the Pharmacopeia have failed because they have uniformly encountered the objection that the articles or preparations are used by some physicians and therefore should be recognized and authoritatively defined. In the preface to the last edition of his "Text-Book of Pharmacology and Therapeutics," Cushny announces that the space devoted to many of the less important and less reliable drugs has been much curtailed, that many have been omitted altogether from consideration, and that this is in accordance with the general trend of medical progress and further that therapeutics would probably not have suffered from an even more drastic selection. He further says: "For as long as he [the medical student] has to learn the supposed virtues of a host of obscure substances, he will tend to use them in practice, even if only tentatively. This in turn necessitates their inclusion in the pharmacopeias, which again gives them some standing and perpetuates them as subjects of teaching and examination. If examiners would break this vicious circle, they would render the subject of pharmacology more attractive to him. There is no question that the insistence on numberless preparations of drugs of questionable value has discouraged interest in therapeutics." Efforts were made by the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association and the Confederation of State Examining and Licensing Boards to restrict instruction and examination in materia medica to the more important drugs, and this suggested the desirability of selecting a fundamental list of drugs with which all medical students and practitioners might be expected to be familiar and to which, therefore, state examining and licensing boards might largely or entirely confine their examinations in materia medica. A list prepared by the Council on Medical Education and the National Confederation of State Medical Examining and Licensing Boards was taken as a basis by the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry, and, after various revisions, more or less guided by numerous criticisms and suggestions from teachers of materia medica, deans of medical schools, secretaries and members of state medical examining and licensing boards, and other members of the medical profession, was published in a preliminary form under the title "Useful Remedies." After still further revision in the light of advice and information elicited through this preliminary publication, the first edition of the present volume was published under the title "A Handbook of Useful Drugs." This little work presented a brief but practical discussion, from the modern point of view, of the drugs which remained after the winnowing and sifting process above described. It was offered as a text on which teachers of materia medica and therapeutics might base their instruction and state examining boards their examinations. In the words of the preface to the first edition, it was "confidently predicted that an intelligent and critical use of these selected drugs will prove their general sufficiency and show that many drugs now discussed in textbooks are superfluous and that many newly discovered or widely exploited proprietary preparations have no advantage over those contained in this book." This prediction has been more and more justified since the original publication in 1913. A number of medical schools and state medical examining and licensing boards have taken "Useful Drugs" as a basis for their instruction and examinations in materia medica. As the time of publication of the ninth revision of the U. S. Pharmacopeia and the fourth edition of the National Formulary coincided with the preparation of this edition of “Useful Drugs,” the changes in the requirements of these two official books of standards have naturally been incorporated in this volume. |