Unlike the often florid, voluptuary Romantic English and French chroniclers of hashish eating who enthralled the literary world, Physicians took much more prosaic attitudes toward marijuana.

Bell concerns himself with personal reactions to the drug and reactions of different forms of mental illness to its therapeutic use. With a professional skepticism he tries to relate the effects to possible mechanisms of mental illness.

O'Day describes a personal incident; intoxicated by an overdose of a cough cure containing cannabis—at the controls of a locomotive.

Foulis recounts a "trip" of an art student and a medical student who had come under the spell of the then "high priest of drugs," De Quincey.

Today, if Doctors Hamilton, Les cohier, and Perkins had been able to find a publisher for the description of their antics in the lcrb at Parke, Davis 8c Company, they would quickly have been taken in custody by the narcotics police and remanded to durance vile. The "dope farm" located at Rochester, Michigan, would be burned, the implements seized as evidence, and the company bankrupted by Internal Revenue Service tax liens.

As it turned out, Dr. Lescohier went on to become the president of the company. His colleagues went on to other successful careers.

Professor Walton wrote me some four years ago that he wasn't a bit surprised at his book being forgotten by the modern authors. He considers it a fact of scientific life that new work done on an old drug or principle is likely to overlook much of the past.

It is sad that this most comprehensive recent book, from which the excerpt beginning on page 83 is taken, is absent from most modern scientific reference lists.