Clinical Pharmacology 3. [antikvár]

A LOOK AT A NEW DISCIPLINE: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Richard K. Richards Professor of Pharmacology, Northwestern University, Medical School, Chicago 11, Illinois, U.S.A. In the late twenties of this century, a German surgeon named Liek published a small book entitled The Physician and his Mission (Der Arzt und seine Sendung). Though not exceedingly profound, its vivid style and often sarcastic criticism of dogmas and habits of medical practice and research in those days aroused widespread comments in his country. At that time, I was a medical student and had just started some graduate work n pharmacology. One of Liek's incisive phrases struck me particularly forceful, probably because of my intense interest in both clinical medicine and pharmacology, namely "Internal medicine celebrates its greatest triumphs in such conditions which heal by themselves or where the diagnosis is wrong". Allowing for some literary license in the phraseology there was no way of denying the presence of a great deal of truth in this pronouncement. Liek's statement would have been even more applicable some 20 to 30 years earlier than when he pronounced it—not only because of the concrete advances in therapeutics which had already taken place, such as the contributions of Ehrlich, Banting and Best, Minot and Murphy, and others, to the therapeutic armamentarium, but because these very discoveries heralded the advent of a new era of therapeutic research, bringing together an organized effort of new thought and new techniques developed in and adapted from advances on a broad front of biological and chemical research. No field so intimately connected with the life of individuals and of populations as medicine can fail to reflect in some way in its development and even more so in its outside manifestations, the trends and habits of the concomitant civilization and the "way of life" of its contemporary period. Thus the tremendous growth of the chemical industry with its outpour of a never before dreamed of number of new synthetic compounds