Trousseau maintains that there are two classes of physicians, the one of science, which reaps, and the other of art, which produces. In no department of medicine is this better manifested than in the production and application of our standard prescriptions. The gift of prescribing is a rare one. Not every physician can always write a prescription in keeping with his general attainments. To "make up" a prescription that will skillfully and consistently cover a complicated train of pathological dynamics, without running into the folly of polypharmacy, is the "gift of poetry" in medicine that few probably are possessed of. He who is blessed with this gift has the power to draw on his medical knowledge with consummate judgment and skill. He will, in all likelihood, be correct in both his pathological and therapeutic diagnosis. He is, virtually, the cap-stone of medical lore. All the departments of medicine are at his service. He interprets the laws of health, disease, and medicine, and treats their co-relation with beneficent practical results.

This inability as a prescriptionist, which learning alone cannot always correct, has misled many a one in appreciating the virtue of medicine. A noted medical teacher once remarked: "It is a mere pseudo-science which is misleading so many, that it has become common-place to know something about drugs, and to prescribe them; the new school of pathologists and physiologists look upon the whole business of medicine giving as unscientific and therefore unworthy the attention of the higher order of medical thinkers. It is a very fascinating doctrine, that to be ignorant of drugs is to be regarded as superior to the common-place - as being in the higher walks of medical life - and hence many make haste to adopt it, relying for the hereafter on mint water in the treatment of rheumatism, and similar nihilistic absurdities. The great question of the times, is, does it pay? Applying this utilitarian method to the subject, I answer, it does not pay to be ignorant of therapeutics, and I prove my position by some illustrative examples selected from the recently deceased. The most successful physicians Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, Edinburg have had for a generation were Trousseau, Oppolzer, Traube, Todd, Bigbie - all of whom were most careful students of therapeutics - have contributed to our knowledge of the subject, and were diligent prescribers of remedies. These men were not only successful teachers and clinicians, but had great local renown as practitioners."

Dr. Andrew Clark in an address before the Paris Academy of Medicine, made the remark: "Therapeutics is the highest department of our art, and one of its chief ends." On the authority of the "London Lancet": "It may be said with safety and literal truth that drugs never played a more important part than they do now; that they never did so much good, and so little harm, as in the present practice of medicine."

But, let us take another direction where prescription writing is a necessity. How often do we read a clever report of an interesting case, but with a treatment that gives little or no satisfaction to the reader, because the same is couched in generalities, with not a formal prescription to know how much the treatment had to do with the nature of the case. We admit, that a prescription given in a report, cannot always be received for general acceptance; but, where it is a factor of a report, it opens before us a positiveness in the treatment all can comprehend. Let us give an example: "The case was treated with strychnia, arsenic, quinine and iron." Now, no two physicians reading the above directions would proportion alike these powerful medicines; but let the directions read:

℞ Strychnise

Arsenici aa.........gr. i

Quiniae...........3 ss

Ferri Redacti.........3 i e. Make into 50 pills.

S. One to be taken three times a day.

Here is a treatment specified that is positive, clearly understood, and not open to error and accident in its application to a similiar case, or, as a formula constituting a safe basis for any indicated modification.