The prescriptions in this book are arranged under a nosological, anatomical, symptomatical classification. This plan was adopted to make the work acceptable for ready reference in medical consultation. We admit that the arrangement is open to objections, but perhaps less so than any other. The therapeutic classification would have been more scientific, but of less use to the practitioner. Even here, owing to the complex nature of many prescriptions, it would be impossible to fix their scientific habitation. We cannot classify prescriptions as a body, as we can individual drugs, and any attempt to do so will prove of little value, and lead to confusion.

The complications that at times intervene in diseases - their changes - the impossibility for a time, always, to fix on a certain diagnosis, led us to use freely the symptomatic classification. Whatever objections may be rendered to this, we cannot conceal the fact that a large per centage of medical treatment is necessarily symptomatic, and often with the same results as if the most accurate and unerring diagnosis had been made. We will venture on an axiom in practice, that will hold good in a multitude of cases. Remove the symptoms of a disease, and you will remove the disease itself.