of past tuberculous disease of the lungs which had ceased its activity—­been, in fact, cured, either spontaneously or by medical intervention.  Such intervention, it has been abundantly proved, is altogether likely to be successful if it is of the right sort and employed early.  There is, to be sure, no cure-all.  Powerful as the climatic treatment is, it must be supplemented by measures accurately adapted to the individual case, and failure to comprehend this fact still leads many a phthisical person to his grave.  But information is rapidly being diffused, sanatoria for such of the tuberculous as can take advantage of them are multiplying, and those who are shut off from their aid are growing more and more cognizant of how they should live in order to give themselves the best chance of recovery and save their associates from infection.  The era of consumption-cures—­meaning drugs—­is past; but the disease is cured in an ever-increasing proportion of instances, and that, too, by medical though not medicinal measures.

At almost every turn medicine has been powerfully assisted by the sciences which should rather be termed correlative than subsidiary.  Notable among them is chemistry.  The isolation of the active principles of medicinal plants—­such as morphine, quinine, strychnine, and cocaine—­has been a remarkable service rendered by chemistry to medicine.  How should we be handicapped if we still had to fight malarial disease with the crude Peruvian bark instead of its chief alkaloid, quinine!  And how impracticable if not impossible would it be to render the eye insensitive to pain with any extract of coca leaves, no matter how concentrated—­a purpose that we accomplish almost instantly with cocaine!  Of minor importance, perhaps, but not to be despised, is the resulting liberation from the old slavery to bulky and nauseous drugs.  The isolation of active principles long antedated the synthetical preparations, but the latter came at last—­the marvellous array of hypnotics, anodynes, and fever-quellers that are now at our command, largely coal-tar products.  But it is not to pure chemistry alone that we are indebted for the elegant dosing of the present day; progressive pharmacy, with its tablets, its coated pills, and its capsules, has put to shame the old-time purveyor of galenicals.  Right jauntily do we now take our “soda mint” in case of slight derangement of the stomach, happily oblivious of its vile prototype, the old rhubarb and soda mixture.  Even castor oil has been stripped of its repulsiveness by the combinations which the soda water fountain affords.

It was but a step, we can now realize, from the employment of isolated vegetable principles to that of preparations of certain glandular organs of the animal economy, but the doctrine of “internal secretions” had to intervene, and its evolution took time; not till toward the close of the century did the venerable Brown-Sequard lead up to it.  We have not yet come to “eye of newt and toe of frog,”