Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

diarrhoea…If plentifully prescribed it requires to be well diluted with
small liquor, it will cause a sweat.’ (King, 2001). This kind of mixture
where the active salicylate would have been efficacious in fevers
combined with seemingly irrelevant herbs might cause adverse
interactions. Virginian Snake Root was used for the fever in the
Great Plague of 1665, but it is difficult to find if it had any active
principle. There were several different snake roots: Virginian, Indian
and Chinese.
‘Formulaire pour la préparation et l’emploi de plusieurs nouveaux
médicaments, tels que la noix vomique, les sels de morphine, l’acide
prussique, la strychnine, la veratrine, le sulphate de quinine, la
cinchonine, l’émétine, l’iode, l’iodure de mercure, le cyanure de
potassium, l’huile de croton tiglium, les sels d’or, les sels de platine,
les chlorures de chaux, et de soude, les bicarbonates alcalins, les
pastilles digestive de Vichy, l’écorce de la del racine de Grenadier,
les préparations de phosphore, etc., etc.’ par F. Magendie. Imprint,
Paris: Chez Méquignon-Marvis, 1927. [The formula for the
preparation and the use of several drugs, such as nux vomica,
morphine salts, prussic acid, veratrine, quinine sulphate, cinchona,
emetine, iodine, mercuric iodide, potassium cyanide, croton, tiglium
oil, gold salts, platinum salts, calcium and sodium chloride, the
alkaline bicarbonates, Vichy digestive pastilles, root bark of
pomegranite and phosphorus preparations, etc, etc.]
1828 PCA Louis (1787–1872) of the Charité Hospital, Paris, showed that
when patients were bled for pneumonia that the longer it was
delayed the fewer deaths there were, but there were confounders
and the sample was too small to be valid. (Louis, 1828; Wade, 1970;
Morabia, 2006). He was one of the early enthusiasts for group
comparisons where the subjects were to be taken ‘indiscriminately’,
one group for treatment A and a similar sized group for treatment B.
With groups of 500 he hoped that they would be similar in all other
attributes ‘all things being equal’. He also hoped that the errors in the
two groups would compensate each other (Morabia, 2006). This was
an important step in the history of pharmacoepidemiology. Tröhler
suggests that English physicians used numbers earlier and quoted
John Graunt (1620-1674) who published Bills of Mortality for London
from 1662 and gave rough life expectancies (Tröhler, 1978).
Dr Schabel of Tübingen said, ’I have…long discarded hellebore.’
Friedrich Wohler (1800–1882) synthesised urea, the first synthetic
organic chemical and heralded the birth of the present