indicated the particular planet they were under led to their use in diseases and for constitutions supposed to be under the same planet. Physicians to this day head their prescriptions with a sign that originally meant an invocation to Jupiter, but now represents the word recipe.
The belief, which is still held by the Chinese, that the excrements of animals retain the properties and peculiarities of the animals from which they are derived, led to the use in medicine of these disgusting remedies, which are still sold in drug shops in China, and were only omitted from the English Pharmacopoeia as late as 1721. At that date the science of chemistry was very imperfectly known, and the real constituents of ordinary remedies so little understood that different virtues were attributed to different products containing the same constituents. Thus, prepared oyster-shells, coral, pearls, crabs' “eyes” and burnt hart's horn were regarded as specifics in different complaints, in ignorance of the fact that they all contain, as the chief ingredients, calcium phosphate and carbonate. The celebrated Gascoigne's powder, which was sold as late as the middle of the 19th century in the form of balls like sal prunella, consisted of equal parts of crabs “eyes,” the black tips of crabs' claws, Oriental pearls, Oriental bezoar and white coral, and was administered in jelly made of hart's horn, but was prescribed by physicians chiefly for wealthy people, as it cost about forty shillings per ounce. Superstition also entered largely into the choice of remedies. Thus various parts of criminals, such as the thigh bone of a hanged man, moss grown on a human skull, &c., were used, and even the celebrated Dr Culpeper in the 17th century recommended “the ashes of the head of a coal black cat as a specific for such as have a skin growing over their sight.”
In course of time the knowledge of drugs, and consequently the number in use, gradually increased, and some of the preparations made in accordance with the art attained a celebrity that lasted for centuries. Thus diachylon plaster was invented by Menecrates in A.D. 1, and was used by him for the same purposes as it is employed to-day. An electuary of opium, known as Mithradatum, was invented by Mithradates VI., king of Pontus, who lived in constant fear of being poisoned, and tested the effects of poisons on criminals, and is said to have taken poisons and their antidotes every day in the year. The prescription for the general antidote known as Mithradatum was found with his body, together with other medical MSS., by Pompey, after his victory over that king. The prescription was improved by Damocrates and Andromachus, body physicians to Nero. The first was subsequently known as Mithradatum Damocratis, and the second as Theriaca Andromache, the name Theriaca or Tiriaca being derived from the snake called Tyrus, the flesh of which was added to it by Andromachus. The former contained 55, or, according to some formulae, 72 ingredients, and occurs in all the dispensaries, from that of Corvus Valerius up to the pharmacopoeias of the 19th century; and aromatic preparations of opium are still used, under the name of Theriaka in Persia. The Theriaca prepared at Venice had the highest reputation, probably because in Venice the component parts were exposed to the inspection of wise men and doctors for two months, to determine whether they were or were not fit for use. The apothecaries' ordinance at Nuremberg provided that no Theriaca should in future be branded with the seal of the city unless it had been previously examined and declared worthy of the same by the doctors of medicine, and that every druggist must know the age of the Theriaca he sold. Inasmuch as its action changed very materially with age, “the buyer should in all instances be informed, so that he may not be deceived.” The last public preparation of Theriaca took place at Nuremberg in 1754.
In A.D. 77–78 Dioscorides of Anazarba, in Cilicia, wrote his great work on materia medica, which still remains the most important work on the plants and drugs used in ancient times (of which about 400 were enumerated) and until the 17th century was held as the most valuable guide to medicinal plants and drugs extant. Nearly 100 years afterwards Galen, the imperial physician at Rome (A.D. 131–200), who was learned in surgery, pharmacy and materia medica, added about 200 more plants to those described by Dioscorides.
Galen believed in the doctrine of humours originated by Hippocrates, which supposes the condition of the body to depend upon the proper mixture of the four elements, hot, cold, moist and dry, and that drugs possess the same elementary qualities, and that on the principle of contraries one or other was indicated, e.g. a cooling remedy for a feverish state. This doctrine was held for many centuries, and drugs are classed by all the old herbalists as having one or other of these qualities in a greater or less degree. Galen is said to have invented hiera-picra, which he employed as an anthelmintic, it is still used in England as a domestic remedy. In the 6th century Alexander of Tralles used colchicum for gout, iron for anaemia, and rhubarb in liver weakness and dysentery. The practice of pharmacy was extended by the Arabian physicians, and the separation of it from medicine was recognized in the 8th, and legalized in the 11th century. The practice of “polypharmacy,” or the use of a large number of ingredients in prescriptions, which was common in the middle ages, was greatly due to the view enunciated by Alkekendo, and held by one of the Arabian schools of medicine: that the activity of medicine increases in a duplicate ratio when compounded with others; and it was only in the first half of the 18th century that the practice was altogether discontinued in the pharmacopoeias, although the theory was shown to be incorrect by Averroes in the 12th century.
The establishments for dispensing medicines at Cordova, Toledo and other large towns under Arab rule, were placed under severe legal restrictions. Frederick II. in A.D. 1253 passed a law, which remained in force for a long time in the two Sicilies, by which every medical man was required to give information against any pharmacist who should sell bad medicine. The pharmacists were divided into two classes, the stationarii, who sold simple drugs and non-magisterial preparations at a tariff determined by competent authorities, and the confectionarii, whose business it was to dispense scrupulously the prescriptions of medical men; all pharmaceutical establishments were placed under the surveillance of the college of medicine. In the monastic period pharmacy was to a great extent under the control of the religious orders, particularly the Benedictines, who, from coming into contact with the Arabian physicians, devoted themselves to pharmacy, pharmacology and therapeutics, but, as monks were forbidden to shed blood, surgery fell largely into the hands of barbers, so that the class of barber-surgeons came into existence, and the sign of their skill in blood-letting still appears in provincial districts in England in the form of the barber's pole, representing the application of bandages.
In England the separation between medicine and pharmacy was somewhat later than on the continent of Europe. The earliest record of an apothecary's shop in London was in 1545. The status of the apothecary, as subordinate to the physician in the time of Henry VIII, is evident from the following, out of 21 rules laid down by a prominent apothecary, who was a cousin of Anne Boleyn: “His garden must be at hand, with plenty of herbs and seeds and roots. He must read Dioscorides. He must have mortars, pots, filters, glasses and boxes clean and sweet. He must have two places in the shop, one most clean for physic, and the base place for chirurgic stuff. He is neither to increase nor to diminish the physician's prescription, he is neither to buy nor to sell rotten drugs. He is only to meddle in his own vocation; and to remember that his office is only to be the physician's cook.”
The drugs used by the physicians and apothecaries were purchased from the grossarii or sellers in gross, who were subsequently called grocers, some of whom specialized as druggists and others as chymists or chemists. The apothecaries, who were the pharmacists of those days, were not represented by any corporate body, but in the reign of King James I., in 1606, were incorporated with the Company of Grocers. This arrangement was not, however, approved of by the physicians, who obtained in 1617 a separate charter for the apothecaries, to the number of 114, which was the number of physicians then
