PHYTOPHARMACOLOGY AS AN AID TO DIAGNOSIS AND EVALUATION OF THERAPY IN PEMPHIGUS, PSYCHOSES AND CARCINOMA †

Thirty-two years ago the author, while working as an associate of Professor John J. Abel, the father of American pharmacology, at Johns Hopkins Medical School, conceived the idea of comparing animals with plants in respect to their responses to various drugs and chemicals. In order to do so, he spent more than a year in the laboratories of the late Professor Burton Livingston, head of the department of plant physiology at Johns Hopkins University (1). The methods for studying the effects of drugs on living vegetable test objects are numerous and cannot be described in detail here (2-4). However, just as certain standard animals are employed for learning the principles of physiology, so are the seedlings of the hardy plant, Lupinus albus, used extensively for teaching plant physiology. These seedlings were found to be most useful for our purposes because of their single straight roots when grown in plant physiologic solutions [Shive's (5)]. Thus a new department of biology was born, to which the name of phytopharmacology was given in contrast to zo6pharmacology, which is the ordinary pharmacology taught in medical schools. Numerous drugs and chemicals were examined and their effects on the root growth of Lupinus seedlings in hydroponic solutions under standard ecologic conditions were measured and statistically evaluated (6,7). Some chemicals inhibited root growth as compared with normal controls, whereas others actually stimulated the growth of the plants (8). The results were usually expressed by what was termed the index of growth or phytotoxicity, as shown by the formula: