According to Burlureaux,1 the credit of the introduction of sodium cacodylate as a therapeutic agent belongs to Gautier, who on June 6, 1899, reported a series of observations in which he (Burlureaux) assisted. During the succeeding four years numberless enthusiastic, not to say extravagant, articles by European observers heralded the drug as a desirable substitute for metallic arsenic. On Jan. 31, 1903, however, T. R. Fraser2 gave the drug, so far as English and American clinicians and authors are concerned, its coup de grâce, for, with but one or two exceptions, all English and American textbooks on materia medica deny the possibility of the drug, used hypodermatically, having either physiologic action or therapeutic value. In the article alluded to Fraser says:
"The... therapeutic effects of arsenic are caused by its pharmacologic action, and if it be so united with other bodies as to be incapable of producing any