Dr. John Uri Lloyd, in The Eclectic Medical Gleaner, emphasizes the increased dangerous activity of certain drugs when used alone as compared with their mild and favorable action when used in their native environment. He says, under the head of "Dangerous Products:"

Remedies that in their natural condition were kindly and beneficial proved, when elaborated from surrounding structures, to be somewhat as is nitro-glycerin if contrasted with gunpowder. The explosion is likely to burst the gun if enough be used to blow out the ball.

It is the custom of some who make compounds to be given to the people indiscriminately and in large quantities, to liberally use caffein as a constituent of their headache cures. Some people argue that because caffein is obtained from coffee and tea, it is the one "active principle" of coffee and of tea, whilst others imagine that because coffee and tea can be used without stint in the making of a structural decoction which carries the caffein in assimilable combination, caffein itself may be likened to the drugs from which destructive chemistry produces caffein. Dr. Claisse, in La Clinique, France, has reported several accidents from solutions of caffein, and even from caffein in its usual dose.

In a brief communication to the same journal, Dr. Triboulet indorses his colleagues warning, and declares that caffein, although a valued therapeutical agent, is a brutal medicament, the action of which is extremely difficult to regulate. In the first place, when given hypodermically, it often excites local inflammation when the drug is deposited too superficially under the skin. Secondly, it is a powerful cerebral excitant, and capable of causing maniacal delirium, especially in aged persons.