Heterogeneous Prescriptions.

Editor Ellingwood's Therapeutist:

I feel as if it were my duty to enter a mild protest against the method of some of your writers who claim to be specific, in presenting some of the polypharmacal prescriptions which are there presented.

If they are specific prescribers, why do they present such prescriptions? The components of their formulae are as numerous as the letters of the German alphabet, and the method does not deserve to be called specific. As such it would be a misnomer.

Under the title "Our Faith," on the first page of the cover of our guide, THE THERAPEUTIST, there is enough to set every thinking physician to work to solve for himself a correct method of drug application.

It seems to me that it is the duty of every physician, whether he has been educated in specific methods or not, to study these principles very thoroughly, and to adjust the method to them, looking always for a greater success than he has ever been able to attain in the past.

I have taken THE THERAPEUTIST since the first number, and I assure you that I have been more than repaid by the many valuable, direct suggestions. These impress upon me the fact that the journal should be made a source of education in direct lines, to every reader, especially those who have not had a course of clinical training in these methods.

May the journal live long and make many true converts to these principles, is the best wish of the writer.

Yours, for a perfected knowledge of single remedies,

COMMENT:—This letter, I regret to say, is justifiable from the character of some of the articles I have published; but I have thought, in giving this matter careful consideration, that I cannot prove our contention unless I do publish some of the heterogeneous prescriptions that are furnished me.

They are but few as compared with the host of direct suggestions, plainly specific, which we have published. Many of these writers are just taking their first lesson in specific drug action, and are earnestly seeking for the real truth.

It is a most unfortunate thing, and, I think, entirely unwarranted, that all colleges, of whatever school, have not for fifty years, been studying and teaching the direct action of single remedies in exact conditions of disease. How this has been overlooked for so long is a mystery, indeed, to those to whom its simplicity, directness and superiority are now so strikingly plain.

Let each of us try for the coming year, to materially improve the knowledge of all, by contributing freely our direct, specific facts in the most direct manner possible.

Ellingwood's Therapeutist, Vol. 2, 1908, was edited by Finley Ellingwood M.D.