TO HAVE practiced medicine during the past quarter century has been a privilege and an exciting experience. During that period, there has been a striking change of emphasis from tissue pathology to physiology and biochemistry. In association with this, therapeutic nihilism has been replaced by a dynamic and effective pharmacology. The two fields in which the most rapid advances in Pharmacologic theory and practice have occurred are those of antibiosis and endocrinology.
Those physicians who received their training and who practiced medicine in the period preceding the antibiotic era can well recall the feeling of inadequacy inspired by an average patient with Pneumococcus pneumonia and, to a much greater degree, by the patient with bacterial meningitis or Staphylococcus septicemia.
Following upon the initial demonstration of the effectiveness of sulfanilamide, increasingly potent chemotherapeutic and antibiotic agents became available at an amazing rate. As a result, the clinician may now approach the