PHYTOPHARMACOLOGIC EXAMINATION OF THE BLOOD IN PEMPHIGUS AND IN SOME OTHER DISEASES OF THE SKIN

It is well known that those chemicals which are generally termed either drugs or poisons produce certain definite and often characteristic physiologic changes in living matter when they are administered to animals in vivo or are applied to surviving organs of the same or even when applied to parts of living animal tissue and to individual cells. Such changes produced by drugs or chemicals are spoken of as pharmacodynamic changes and may be produced by substances obtained from the mineral kingdom, the animal kingdom or the vegetable kingdom. In the last few years it has been shown by one of us (D. I. M.) that living animal tissues, which may be utilized for obtaining pharmacodynamic responses to various chemicals, are not the only test objects at the disposal of the pharmacologist. It has been found that living plant protoplasm often responds with greater sensitiveness to the action of certain chemicals or substances applied to it than living animal tissues do ; indeed, such test objects borrowed from the domain of plant physiology may respond to the effects of certain drugs or chemicals which fail to produce any appreciable changes in test objects obtained from living animals. This was found to be especially true of certain metabolic products elaborated by the human body.