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Featured Clinical Reviews

Article
February 11, 1974

Perspective From a Quarter Century of Antibiotic Usage

Author Affiliations

From the Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine, University of Illinois, Chicago.

JAMA. 1974;227(6):634-637. doi:10.1001/jama.1974.03230190026007
Abstract

We are at a point in the antibiotic era where one can begin to look back on the historical development of chemotherapy. These events have affected our lives in many ways including discovery, investigation, education, regulation, and miraculous cure of disease. It is clear that by our use, overuse, and abuse of chemotherapy in our present practices, we have failed to reach the optimal treatment of infectious diseases and have created some new problems. Our vantage point provides enough experience to have perspective, sufficient new knowledge to make us wiser, and vision to motivate realistic, critical assessment, and find new aspirations and aims.

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