Drugs on Trial: Experimental Pharmacology and Therapeutic Innovation in the Eighteenth-Century

Experimental pharmacology is often portrayed as a creation of the nineteenth century, the age of the sciences in medicine. This book demonstrates that the basic methodology of the field, including chemical analysis, in vitro testing, animal experimentation and human research, was already developed in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Putting remedies on trial was stimulated by the challenge to Galenism through new chemical, mechanical and vitalist concepts of disease, ...