ABSTRACT
The word pharmacology is derived from the Greek pharmakon, equivalent to ‘drug’, ‘medicine’ or ‘poison’, and logia, meaning ‘study’. But the question ‘What is pharmacology?’ is only partially answered by the derivation of the term. We have seen that it is a branch of biology, because it is concerned with living organisms, and as such it borrows heavily from kindred subjects like physiology and biochemistry for much of its substantive matter and experimental techniques. Pharmacology is equally related to chemistry, because it deals with chemical agents and is dependent upon knowledge of their sources and properties. Also, pharmacology is an essential part of medicine. For although a drug, in broad terms, is any chemical agent other than food that affects living organisms, in its medicinal sense a drug is any chemical agent used in the treatment, cure, prevention or diagnosis of disease. Pharmacology makes use of mathematics to express its principles in quantitative terms and of behavioral sciences, such as psychology, to understand the actions of drugs that lead to changes in mood or emotion. Thus pharmacology is the unified study of the properties of chemicals and living organisms and all aspects of their interactions; it is an integrative rather than an autonomous science, drawing on the techniques and knowledge of many allied scientific disciplines.
