regular medical attendant of Count Cinchon, introduced the new remedy into Spain, but it was not until after the lapse of about fourteen years that the drug found its way into England and Central Europe. The price at which it could be purchased was at first very high; it was almost literally "worth its weight in gold." Even as late as 1680 the bark sold in England for £8 sterling per pound. Notwithstanding the generally recognized value of the drug in the treatment of certain fevers there were not a few men who continued for many years to oppose its use. Thus, Johann Kanold, a practitioner of medicine in Breslau, Germany, is reported to have said, on his deathbed in 1729, that he would rather die than be cured by a remedy the action of which was so opposed to all the principles which he considered right in therapeutics.
Ipecacuanha, another very important drug, was added to our stock of remedial agents toward the end of the seventeenth century. It was brought into France from Brazil, in 1672, by a French physician named Le Gras, but its value as a remedy for the cure of dysentery did not begin to be appreciated until after Helvetius, a semi-quack, had sold to Louis the Fourteenth, for one thousand louis-d'or (about $4000), the formula for the preparation which he (Helvetius) had been using with great success during the recent epidemic of that disease, and which moreover had effected a remarkably rapid cure in the case of the King's own son—the Dauphin. After the purchase had been made by Louis the Fourteenth, in the interest of the French people in general, it was ascertained that the only active reagent among the ingredients of the formula was ipecac, a drug with which the Paris physicians had long been more or less familiar. Ipecac, it will also doubtless be remembered, constitutes the important element in what is known as the East Indian treatment of dysentery.
Probably the earliest modern treatise on matters connected with pharmacy is that which bears the title "Onomasticon Latino-Germanico-Polonicum rerum ad artem pharmaceuticam pertinentium." It was published about the year 1600, and its author was Paul Guldinus.
