- ers. "Simple remedies," he declared, "are pure and
unadulterated, and produce effects in only one direction. It is the business of pharmacology to combine drugs in such a manner—according to their elementary qualities of heat, cold, moistness and dryness—as shall render them effective in combating or overcoming the conditions which exist in the different diseases." Galen's interest in pharmacology materially aided the advance of medical science in other ways. He systematized the existing knowledge of materia medica and infused some measure of orderliness into the therapeutics of his day. The success of his efforts in this direction did not become manifest until after he had been dead about fifty years; but, if his ideas were slow in meeting with general acceptance, they took such deep root in the minds of physicians that to-day in Persia Galen's system of therapeutics is the only one generally received as authoritative. Although the facts do not warrant our making the same statement with regard to Western and Southern Europe, it is nevertheless true that our dispensatories still continue to honor the memory of this great physician by bestowing the name of "Galenical Preparations" on a large group of pharmaceutical combinations.
It is scarcely possible to state with any degree of positiveness at what date pharmacists, in the modern sense of the term, came to be recognized as constituting a separate and honorable class in every well-organized community. It is known, however, that in Syria and Persia, during the eighth and ninth centuries of the present era, not a few of the leading physicians were the sons of apothecaries. Honein, for example, of whose career I furnished a brief sketch in Chapter XIX., was the son of an apothecary; and the careful manner in which he was educated during his youth justifies the belief that his father must have been a man of some cultivation and not at all like the general average of that class of men of whom Galen speaks so disparagingly. But even at that early period there certainly were individuals who were skilled in the pharmaceutic art, for Berendes (op. cit.) tells us that Dioscorides (circa 100 A. D.) describes minutely the
