Prof. Richet, the head of the department of physiology, University of Paris, quotes the expression of a French critic of medicine: "Hurry up and take the new remedy while it still cures. After a time it will lose its power." The power that is lost as remedies grow familiar is the suggestive element that accompanied them at the beginning. They were announced with a flourish of trumpets as a discovery in therapeutics, a number of cases treated with them {20} were much benefited (because of the feeling that they must do good), and it was only after a great many cases had been treated, many of them under circumstances where patients knew nothing of the claims made for the remedies, and where physicians had little or no previous confidence in them, that their true place in therapeutics was revealed. Every physician of experience has seen the popularity of remedies wax and wane as a consequence of the attention called to them. We have new therapeutic discoveries every week. Enthusiastic articles are written about them, many of them in perfect good faith, and then after a time no more is heard of them, or they sink back into the long list of dubious remedies that may be tried when others have failed, but have no special claim upon us, in spite of the fact that some physicians continue to think them wonder-working. "Time is short and art is long, the occasion is fleeting, experience fallacious and judgment difficult," as Hippocrates bemoaned 2400 years ago, and conditions in medicine continue the same. With suggestions and coincidence ever at work, it is still practically impossible to determine the intrinsic value of any remedy until after a prolonged trial. In the olden time it was still more difficult because there had been no such accumulation of experience as we have to guide us, and so it is not surprising to find striking examples of even great physicians recommending remedies whose main therapeutic influence must have been the element of suggestion. Galen's Theriac.--Perhaps the most striking instance of suggestive therapeutics is Galen's famous _theriac_, various prescriptions for which have come down to us, some of them much more complex than others, so Galen is probably not responsible for all its absurdities. This remedy contained a host of ingredients, some of which neutralized others, and all of which taken together could have had but little effect save by a strong suggestion to the patient that as he was taking so many drugs he surely must be benefited.