Some Recent Additions to the Dietary of the Sick

The great progress in our knowledge of Physiological Chemistry which has been effected during the last quarter ?f a century should have produced a very decided change in the treatment of disease, and Voltaire's celebrated dictum that the practice of medicine mainly consists in " pouring drugs of which we know little into bodies of "which we know less" should be laid on the shelf in company with Albert Smith's medical student and Dickens' Bob Sawyer. " Seeing that the practice of the Medical man largely consists in pouring chemicals into that delicately organised vessel, the human body, and that the chemical changes which thereupon take place, or which normally and abnormally occur in it, are certainly not fnore simple than those which take place in ordinary inert vessels in our laboratories, the necessity for the medical man to have a knowledge of chemistry?and that no slight one?would appear to ordinary minds to stand to reason."*