Arthur Cushny was very interested in optical isomerism, which he regarded as a key sign of living matter. He had previously carried out various researches in vitro and in vivo, using animals. The paper he co-authored with Alvin Peebles describes some of these experiments in dogs and frogs. These are reported concisely in terms of conclusions, but numerical details were largely absent. The paper ends... with a quite different sort of experiment, a clinical trial reported in sufficient numerical detail to have been awarded a special place in the history of statistics, since the data were used by Student in his famous paper, ‘The Probable Error of a Mean’, and subsequently reported by RA Fisher in his book Statistical Methods for Research Workers.