These names are often met with in old medical and pharmaceutical books,
and there is an “elder” and a “younger” of each of them, so that it may
be desirable to explain who they all were. The elder and the younger
of each are sometimes confused. Serapion the Elder, or Serapion of
Alexandria, as he is more frequently named in medical history, lived
in the Egyptian city about 200 B.C., and was the recognised
leader of the sect of the Empirics in medicine. He is credited with
the formula that medicine rested on the three bases, Observation,
History, and Analogy. No work of his has survived, but he is alleged to
have violently attacked the theories of Hippocrates, and to have made
great use of such animal products as castorum, the brain of the camel,
the excrements of the crocodile, the blood of the tortoise, and the
testicles of the boar.
Serapion the Younger was an Arabian physician who lived towards the
end of the tenth century and wrote a work on materia medica which was
much used for some five or six hundred years.
Mesuë the Elder was first physician at the court of Haroun-al-Raschid
in the ninth century. He was born at Khouz, near Nineveh, in 776, and
died at Bagdad in 855. Under his superintendence the School of Medicine
of Bagdad was founded by Haroun. Although a Nestorian Christian, Mesuë
retained his position as first physician to five Caliphs after Haroun.
To his teaching the introduction of the milder purgatives, such as
senna, tamarinds, and certain fruits is supposed to be due. His Arabic
name was Jahiah-Ebn-Masawaih.
Mesuë the Younger is the authority generally meant when formulas under
his name, sometimes quaintly called Dr. Mesuë in old English books, are
quoted. He lived at Cairo about the year 1000. He was a Christian, like
his earlier namesake, and is believed to have been a pupil or perhaps
a companion of Avicenna; at all events, when the latter got into
disgrace it is alleged that both he and Mesuë took refuge in Damascus.
At Damascus Mesuë wrote his great work known in Latin as Receptarium
Antidotarii. From the time of the invention of printing down to the
middle of the seventeenth century, when pharmacopœias became general,
more than seventy editions of this work, mostly in Latin, but a few in
Italian, have been counted. In some of the Latin translations he is
described as “John, the son of Mesuë, the son of Hamech, the son of
Abdel, king of Damascus.” This dignity has been traced to a confusion
of the Arabic names, one of which was very similar to the word meaning
king. Nearly half of the formulæ in the first London Pharmacopœia were
quoted from him.