PHARMACY IN THE TIME OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.
To obtain a clear conception of the great advance that has been made in
medicine and pharmacy, it is necessary to look back through the vista
of centuries at the Elizabethan apothecary. In doing so, we should note
how the influence of superstition and charlatanry, with which the art
of healing was surrounded and intermixed, has been gradually dispersed
under the searching light of science. One can picture the apothecary’s
shop in the days of “good Queen Bess”. Up a narrow winding street,
paved with round cobble stones, and no pathway to protect you from the
jostling and nudges of the passing chair-bearers, French pages, and
watermen who throng the thoroughfares, his abode may be denoted perhaps
by the gilded crocodile which hangs over the doorway, accompanied by
a pole from which depends a pair of brightly-burnished metal pans,
denoting the practice of the chirurgical art. The overhanging gables
of the half-timbered houses darken the low-roofed shop, through whose
small windows filled with little panes of bottle glass, a very dim
light penetrates. A mysterious odour permeates the interior and strange
things are seen hanging from the rafters,—flying fish, tortoises, and
a long alligator float mid-air. Strings of poppy-heads, bunches of
chamomile and centuary, also glass jars containing adders and worms
adorn the counter. On one shelf an array of bright brass mortars, and
round about on others, a great collection of quaint bottles and earthen
pots, containing electuaries, unguents, and lohochs; syrup bottles with
long curved spouts, and bladders full of seeds and wax. In the corner
stands the great iron mortar, whose heavy pestle is suspended from a
spring beam, and another is filled with little drawers to hold the gums
and spices.
[Illustration: AN APOTHECARY.
From an engraving, 1517.]
Away at the back a red glow appears from the furnace, and alembics,
big and little, lie about. At night the shop is crowded with poor
women buying worm-seed for their children or treacle to drive out the
measles, and with country people who have come for drugs and drenches
for their sick cattle. “There are serving-men waiting for their
masters’ purgatives and electuaries, or the fops’ facewashes of oil of
tartar, _lac virginis_, and camphor dissolved in verjuice. Smart maids
are buying conserves and sackets for their mistresses, or perfumes for
my lady’s chamber. Here desperadoes and rakish gallants could purchase
poisons, and blushing maidens would buy their love charms and philtres,
or antidotes to counteract the same. Some apothecaries kept a little
room for taking tobacco, furnished with silver trays, and a maple
block for cutting it, where the gallants met and gossiped, or learned
tricks in smoking from fashionable professors, for nearly all the
apothecaries sold tobacco—real Timidado—nicotine cane, and pudding,
as it was called.” The old apothecary’s prescriptions were composed
of strange ingredients, sometimes crab’s eyes and boar’s teeth, or
powdered pearls, and viper broth. He would recommend you a toad, well
dried in the sun, put in a bag, and hung round the neck by a string
low enough to touch the region of the heart, to allay hæmorrhage. A
preparation of garlic and honey smeared on the person was a certain
charm against the bites of vicious dogs and reptiles, or the stings of
venomous insects. Toothache could be charmed away by a few leaves of
the “shepherd’s purse” placed in the sole of the shoe. An excellent
recipe for sore eyes was the expressed juice of the calyx of the red
honeysuckle, provided always that the flowers were gathered kneeling
and repeating nine Pater nosters in honour of the Trinity, nine more
“to greet our Ladye,” and a creed. My Ladye Falkenbrydge’s recipe for
eye-water was much esteemed, and ran thus: “Corne-flowers gathered
with their cuppes and bruyse them; macerate them in snowe or snowe
water for twentye-foure houres, then dystyl in a moderate sandebath
and applye it night and morning”. This was prescribed in 1553. A
favourite cure for rickety children was to pass them through the split
stem of a tree. For ague, a very well salted herring, split open, was
applied hot to the soles of the feet; or an emerald worn round the neck
formed a potent charm against the same complaint. The learned Boorde,
in his _Breviary of Health_, says: “The medical treatment of the day
was a mixture of religious theories, superstition, and white magic”.
He recommends for a bad rheum the application of oil of scorpions and
fox fat; for a bruised skin, washing it with white wine and plastering
with an oak leaf; and he quaintly states “the best remedy for itching
is long nails and scratching,” which, at any rate, is common-sense. To
preserve the health and a good complexion, he recommends young maids to
wipe their faces daily with a scarlet cloth, and only wash them once a
week.
Another peculiar phase of pharmacy in those early days was the
instructions of the various apothecaries’ guilds to their members as to
prayer. The compounder of prescriptions was directed to go down on his
knees and supplicate before he commenced his labours. Many old herbals
and works on pharmacy, especially in Germany, contain curious wood-cut
illustrations of the apothecary at his devotional exercises. Cyriacus
Schnaus, an apothecary of Nuremberg, published a book in 1565, wherein
he, in person, is represented as kneeling on a large mortar before a
sacred picture. This custom may have been originated by the monks, many
of whom followed the art of healing.
[Illustration: A PHYSICIAN FORECASTING FROM THE URINE.
From an engraving, 1517.]
A writer of the time states that the itinerant dentist was also a
well-known figure at the street corner. For 100 marks he would put out
both your eyes, and quite cure your inflammation with one drop of his
_aqua mirabilis_, at twelve-pence a drop. He offered you an antidote
from stab or bullet for five marks, and by his side waved a banner
stuck all over with horses’ teeth, to show his skill.
He cured your toothache by charms, sometimes writing mysterious words
on a paper, and burning it under your nose; or he would sear your teeth
with hot wires, most effectively; or make you inhale the hot vapour of
henbane seeds, and then show you the worms that he had conjured out,
which are certes now wriggling in the water. He wore a chain of molar
teeth around his neck, and shook them from time to time as he held up a
bottle of liquid and called out: “These are the spirits that pass with
the blood into the rheum, to vex the teeth of men”. His descendants may
still be seen at the present day working wondrous cures, decked out in
similar fantastic garb, or extracting teeth gratis, and by sheer bold
impudence reaping a golden harvest.
Having thus shown how the now almost forgotten pioneers of science laid
the foundation of the arts of medicine and pharmacy, and how much we
owe to their patience and diligence, a brief reference may be made
to the class of medicaments in use in the days of Queen Elizabeth,
immediately prior to the differentiation in England of the first
pharmacists—the apothecaries—and the beginnings of pharmacy as a
separate art.
[Illustration: AN ITINERANT DRUG SELLER.
From a fifteenth century drawing.]
“A few simples,” says Burton, “well prepared and understood, are
better than such a heap of nonsense, confused compounds, which are in
apothecaries’ shops ordinarily sold.”
For madness and melancholy, wormwood was used. Another remedy was
clarified whey, with borage, bugloss, endive, succory, etc., a good
draught of which was taken in the morning, fasting. For the spleen and
liver, syrups were prescribed composed of borage, thyme, epithyme,
hops, scolopendra, fumitory, maiden-hair, and bizantine. These syrups
were mixed with distilled water by the apothecaries, or stirred into
juleps.
Of conserves there were innumerable varieties, and ointments of oil
and wax, as well as liniments and plasters of herbs and flowers, well
boiled with oil or spirits.
Cataplasms and salves were frequently made of green herbs sodden,
pounded, and applied externally.
Gradually, as the years have rolled on, and as the science of chemistry
has unlocked the marvellous resources and products of nature, most
of these old relics of the days of superstition and witchcraft have
been left behind and forgotten, and it remains only for some old
black-lettered tome to tell the story and for us to fill in the
background to the picture.