SUGGESTED REVISIONS OF MEDICAL PHARMACOLOGY *

T H E recent cure of general bacterial infections with drugs of the sul-fonamide group should bury forever the belief that treatment by drugs can be palliative only. It might seem, therefore, that this were as inopportune a time as could be chosen to speak of the failure of pharmacology and to consider reorganization. Science, however, does not progress entirely by revolutionary discoveries, and, although the cure of infections by drugs undoubtedly will stimulate interest in pharmacology for a time, the wide-spread dissatisfaction which exists will become evident again if there is any fundamental cause for it. It would, therefore, seem well to discover, if possible, why it is that Dr. William D. Cutter, Secretary of the American Medical Association Council on Medical Education and Hospitals, in a recent public address,1 stated that pharmacology should be either discon-tinued or reorganized; why it was that the pharmacologists of this country, as well as of Europe, recently met to discuss their difficulties; why two of our newest and most highly endowed schools of medicine failed to provide separate departments of pharmacology; and why others have spent several years trying to decide whether to drop the subject, combine it with physi-ology or biochemistry, or replace it by a therapeutic institute with a clinician at its head. Well over one hundred articles on the status of pharmacology, materia medica, and therapeutics may be found in the literature,2"55 amon