Medicine is a science which hath been more professed
than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced; the
labour having been, in my judgment, rather in circle than
in progression. For I find much iteration, but small
addition.--BACON, “Advancement of Learning.”--Book 2.
The fame of Hippocrates caused naturally a great multiplication of
works attributed to him. The Ptolemies when founding the Library of
Alexandria, which they were determined should be more important than
that of Pergamos, commissioned captains of ships and other travellers
to buy manuscripts of the Greek physician at almost any price; an
excellent method of encouraging forgeries. The works attributed to
Hippocrates have been subject to the keenest scrutiny by scholars, but
even now the verdict of Galen in regard to their genuine or spurious
character is the consideration which carries the greatest weight. Even
the imitations go to prove how free the physician of Cos was from
superstitious practices or prejudiced theories.
Between him and Galen an interval of some six hundred years elapsed
and, especially in the latter half of that period, pharmacy developed
into enormous importance. Not that it necessarily advanced. But the
faith in drugs, and especially in the art of compounding them, and
the wild polypharmacy which grew up in Alexandria and Rome in the
first two centuries of our era, of which Galen shows so much approval,
add inestimably to the chronicles of pharmacy. It was during the
interval between Hippocrates and Galen that the many sects of ancient
medicine, the Dogmatics, the Stoics, the Empirics, the Methodics,
and the Eclectics were born and flourished. Some of these encouraged
the administration of special remedies. But probably a far greater
influence was exercised on the pharmacy of the ancient world by the new
commerce with Africa and the East which the Ptolemies did so much to
foster, and by the travelling quacks and the prescribing druggists who
exploited the drugs of foreign origin which now came into the market.
Serapion of Alexandria, one of the most famous of the Empirics, who is
supposed to have lived in the second century, was largely responsible
for the introduction of the animal remedies which were to figure so
prominently in the pharmacy of the succeeding seventeen centuries.
Among his specifics were the brain of a camel, the excrements of the
crocodile, the heart of the hare, the blood of the tortoise, and the
testicles of the wild boar.
The Empirics were the boldest users of drugs, and so far as can be
judged, were the practitioners who brought opium into general medicinal
esteem. One of the most famous doctors of this sect, Heraclides, made
several narcotic compounds which are commended by Galen. One of these
formulæ prescribed for cholera was 2 drms. of henbane seeds, 1 drm.
of anise, and ½ drm. of opium, made into 30 pills, one for a dose.
Another which was recommended for coughs was composed of 4 drms. each
of juice of hemlock, juice of henbane, castorum, white pepper, and
costus; and 1 drm. each of myrrh and opium.
Musa, a freed slave of Augustus, and apparently a sort of medical
charlatan, but a great favourite with the Emperor, is alleged to have
introduced the flesh of vipers into medical use especially for the cure
of ulcers.
Celsus, Dioscorides, and Pliny, whose works are recognized as the
storehouses of the science of Imperial Rome, belonged to the period
under review. Celsus wrote either a little before or a little after the
commencement of our era. He was the first eminent author who wrote on
medicine in Latin. Pliny died A.D. 79, suffocated by the gases
from Vesuvius, which in his eagerness to observe he had approached too
near during an eruption. Dioscorides is supposed to have lived a little
before Pliny, who apparently quotes him, but curiously never mentions
his name, though usually most scrupulous in regard to his authorities.
Themison, who lived at Rome in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and
who is said to have been the first physician to have distinguished
rheumatism from gout, is noted in pharmacy as the author of the formulæ
for Diagredium and Diacodium. He praised the plantain as a universal
remedy, and is also the earliest medical writer to mention the use of
leeches in the treatment of illness.
Several of the writers on medical subjects of this period adopted
the method of prescribing their formulas and the instructions for
compounding them in verse. The most famous instance is that of
Andromachus, physician to Nero, whose elegiac verses describing
the composition of his Theriakon are quoted by Galen. The idea
was that the formula thus presented was less likely to be tampered
with. Theriakon as invented contained 61 ingredients. Its principal
improvement on the more ancient Mithridatum was the addition of dried
vipers. Andromachus appears to have acquired a large and lucrative
practice in Rome at the time when wealth was most lavishly squandered.
Among other medical verse writers were Servilius Damocrates, who
lived in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, and who invented a famous
tooth powder, a number of malagmata, (emollient poultices), acopa
(liniments for pains), electuaries, and plasters; and Herennius Philon,
a physician of Tarsus (about A.D. 50), whose fame rests on his
philonium, a compound designed to relieve colic pains, which appear
to have been specially frequent at that period. This philonium was
composed of opium, saffron, pyrethrum, euphorbium, pepper, henbane,
spikenard, and honey.
Menecrates, physician to Tiberius, and said to have written 155 works,
was the inventor of diachylon plaster, but his diachylon was a compound
of many juices (as the name implies) along with lead plaster.
The Romans were curiously badly off for regular doctors until Julius
Cæsar specially tempted some to come from Greece and Egypt by offers
of citizenship. Augustus, too, warmly encouraged the settlement in the
city of trained medical men.