Transcriber’s notes:

In this transcription a black dotted underline indicates a hyperlinkto a page, illustration or footnote; hyperlinks are also highlighted incolour when the mouse pointer hovers over them. A red dashed underlinemarks a hidden comment that can be revealed by hovering the mousepointer over the underlined text. Page numbers are shown in the rightmargin. Footnotes are located at the end of the book.

The text contains uncommon characters that will not necessarily displaycorrectly with all viewing devices. If some of the characters lookabnormal, first ensure that the device’s character encoding is set toUnicode (UTF-8). The default font might also need to be changed toa Unicode font such as Arial Unicode MS, DejaVu, Segoe UI Symbol orFreeSerif.

Small-caps font is used extensively, and specifically in theindex to differentiate topics discussed within the text from thosediscussed elsewhere. Readers using handheld devices should be awarethat small-caps font is sometimes lost during conversion of the text tothe e-reader format.

Chemical formulae similarly might not render correctly onhandheld devices

The book contains quotations, comments and reports relating todebates between medical authorities and pharmaceutical suppliers, andthe text is formatted in such a way (in both the original and in thistranscription) as to help readers differentiate the parties to thedebates. Thus, text originating from pharmaceutical sources isdisplayed with a smaller font and greater indentation, while thatfrom medical authorities has closer line spacing and only slightindentation; however, this pattern is not entirely consistent.Inconsistent use of opening and closing quotation marks is as in theoriginal.

There are numerous hyphenation and spelling inconsistencies, themost noticeable perhaps being the inclusion or omission of a final‘e’ from chemical terms such as oxid/oxide. These remain as in theoriginal. A representative list ofthe inconsistencies is appended at the end of the transcriptiontogether with a list of the spelling errors that have been correctedsilently. Inconsistent formatting of fractions, e.g. 1-4 cf. 1/4 isas in the original.

The text contains various words, phrases and comments enclosed bysquare brackets. These were inserted by the authors. A few omissionsnoted by the transcriber have been inserted within curly brackets tohelp differentiate them – hence {of} {a} {be} {“}. A missing full stopand a missing parenthesis have each been inserted silently; redundantduplicated punctuation (. ,) has been deleted silently; and on page 299a duplicated phrase has been deleted silently, viz. this dread diseaseis no longer a matter of doubt."

Several large landscape-format tables have been modified in thistranscription to fit narrower viewing screens and ‘key’s added toidentify the column headings. A mathematical error in Table 2 onpage 390 is as in the original – Rat 4 average weight gain/lossshould be 2.1 not 2.7. Table 11 on page 444 contains a footnotecross-reference to Tables 8 and 10 but these do not exist.

An linked alphabetic table has been inserted at the head of the verylong index to help readers search its contents.