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EDITOR,-Gregory Y H Lip and colleagues say that the purple foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, contains digoxin. 1 This is wrong. Digoxin is obtained from the leaf of the woolly or Balkan foxglove, D lanata, 2 from which it was first isolated by Dr Sydney Smith at Burroughs Wellcome in Britain in 1930. It is still extracted from the plant because, although it can be made synthetically, this is a difficult and expensive process. Soon after the war the Dutch realised that plants would still be essential for the production of important drugs, and with funds from the Marshall Plan they cultivated the foxglove on a large scale. By selective breeding of D lanata they improved the yield of digoxin, and this drug is currently chiefly obtained from plants grown on a cooperative farm at Elburg in the Netherlands. D purpurea yields digitoxin, 3 which is now seldom used in Britain.