ter the
more regular practitioners had failed. I was informed also, that the
effects produced were violent vomiting and purging; for the diuretic
effects seemed to have been overlooked. This medicine was composed of
twenty or more different herbs; but it was not very difficult for one
conversant in these subjects, to perceive, that the active herb could
be no other than the Foxglove.

My worthy predecessor in this place, the very humane and ingenious Dr.
Small, had made it a practice to give his advice to the poor during
one hour in a day. This practice, which I continued until we had an
Hospital opened for the reception of the sick poor, gave me an
opportunity of putting my ideas into execution in a variety of cases;
for the number of poor who thus applied for advice, amounted to
between two and three thousand annually. I soon found the Foxglove to
be a very powerful diuretic; but then, and for a considerable time
afterwards, I gave it in doses very much too large, and urged its
continuance too long; for misled by reasoning from the effects of the
squill, which generally acts best upon the kidneys when it excites
nausea, I wished to produce the same effect by the Foxglove. In this
mode of prescribing, when I had so many patients to attend to in the
space of one, or at most of two hours, it will not be expected that I
could be very particular, much less could I take notes of all the
cases which occurred. Two or three of them only, in which the medicine
succeeded, I find mentioned amongst my papers. It was from this kind
of experience that I ventured to assert, in the Botanical Arrangement
published in the course of the following spring, that the Digitalis
purpurea "merited more attention than modern practice bestowed upon
it."

I had not, however, yet introduced it into the more regular mode of
prescription; but a circumstance happened which accelerated that
event. My truly valuable and respectable friend, Dr. Ash, informed me
that Dr. Cawley, then principal of Brazen Nose College, Oxford, had
been cured of a Hydrops Pectoris, by an empirical exhibition of the
root of the Foxglove, after some of the first physicians of the age
had declared they could do no more for him. I was now determined to
pursue my former ideas more vigorously than before, but was too well
aware of the uncertainty which must attend on the exhibition of the
_root_ of a _biennial_ plant, and therefore continued to use the
_leaves_. These I had fou