Pharmacy, or the art of selecting, extracting, preparing, and
compounding medicines from vegetable, animal, and mineral substances,
is an acquirement which must have been almost as ancient as man himself
on the earth. In experimenting with fruits, seeds, leaves, or roots
with a view to the discovery of varieties of food, our remote ancestors
would occasionally find some of these, which, though not tempting to
the palate, possessed this or that property the value of which would
soon come to be recognised. The tradition of these virtues would be
handed down from generation to generation, and would ultimately become,
by various means, the heritage of the conquering and civilising races.
Of the hundreds of drugs yielded by the vegetable kingdom, collected
from all parts of the world, and used as remedies, in some cases for
thousands of years, I do not know of a single one which can surely be
traced to any historic or scientific personage. It is possible in many
instances to ascertain the exact or approximate date when a particular
substance was introduced to our markets, and sometimes to name the
physician, explorer, merchant, or conqueror to whom we are indebted
for such an addition to our materia medica; but there is always a
history or a tradition behind our acquaintance with the new medicine,
going back to an undetermined past.
In modern dispensatories the ever increasing accumulation of chemical,
botanical, histological, and therapeutic notes has tended to crowd out
the historic paragraphs which brightened the older treatises. Perhaps
this result is inevitable, but it is none the less to be regretted on
account of both the student and the adept in the art of pharmacy. “I
have always thought,” wrote Ferdinand Hoefer in the Introduction to his
still valuable “History of Chemistry” (1842), “that the best method
of popularising scientific studies, generally so little attractive,
consists in presenting, as in a panorama, the different phases a
science has passed through from its origin to its present condition.”
No science nor, indeed, any single item of knowledge, can be properly
appreciated apart from the records of its evolution; and it is as
important to be acquainted with the errors and misleading theories
which have prevailed in regard to it, as with the steps by which real
progress has been made.
The history of drugs, investigations into their cultivation, their
commerce, their constitution, and their therapeutic effects, have
been dealt with by physicians and pharmacologists of the highest
eminence in both past and recent times. In Flückiger and Hanbury’s
“Pharmacographia” (Macmillan: 1874), earlier records were studied
with the most scrupulous care, and valuable new information acquired
by personal observation was presented. No other work of a similar
character was so original, so accurate, or so attractive as this. A
very important systematic study of drugs, profusely illustrated by
reproductions of photographs showing particularly the methods whereby
they are produced and brought to our markets, by Professor Tschirch
of Berne, is now in course of publication by Tauchnitz of Leipsic. In
these humble “Chronicles” it has been impossible to avoid entirely
occasional visits to the domain so efficiently occupied by these great
authorities; but as a rule the subjects they have made their own have
been regarded as outside the scope of this volume.
But the art of the apothecary, of pharmacy, as we should now say,
restricted to its narrowest signification, consists particularly of
the manipulation of drugs, the conversion of the raw material into the
manufactured product. The records of this art and mystery likewise go
back to the remotest periods of human history. In the course of ages
they become associated with magic, with theology, with alchemy, with
crimes and conscious frauds, with the strangest fancies, and dogmas,
and delusions, and with the severest science. Deities, kings, and
quacks, philosophers, priests, and poisoners, dreamers, seers, and
scientific chemists, have all helped to build the fabric of pharmacy,
and it is some features of their work which are imperfectly sketched in
these “Chronicles.”
My original intention when I began to collect the materials for this
book was simply to trace back to their authors the formulas of the most
popular of our medicines, and to recall those which have lost their
reputation. I thought, and still think, that an explanation of the
modification of processes and of the variation of the ingredients of
compounds would be useful, but I have not accomplished this design. I
have been tempted from it into various by-paths, and probably in them
have often erred, and certainly have missed many objects of interest. I
shall be grateful to any critic, better informed than myself, who will
correct me where I have gone astray, or refer me to information which
I ought to have given. I may not have the opportunity of utilising
suggestions myself; but all that I receive will be carefully collated,
and may assist some future writer.