Chronicles of Pharmacy, Vol. 1 (of 2)Wootton, A. C.
History
Chronicles of Pharmacy, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Wootton, A. C.
Pharmacy -- History
The medical views of Hippocrates do not concern us here except as
they affect his pharmaceutical practice; but a very long chapter
might be written on his pharmacy, that is to say, on the use he made
of drugs in the treatment of disease. Galen believed that he made
his preparations with his own hand, or at least superintended their
preparation. Leclerc’s list of the medicaments mentioned as such in the
works attributed to Hippocrates have been already quoted, and it will
be found that after deducting the fruits and vegetables, the milks of
cows, goats, asses, mules, sheep, and bitches, as well as other things
which perhaps we should hardly reckon as medicaments, there remain
between one hundred and two hundred drugs which are still found in our
drug shops. There are a great many animal products, some copper and
lead derivatives, alum, and the earths so much esteemed; but evidently
the bulk of his materia medica was drawn from the vegetable kingdom.
Hippocrates was considerably interested in pharmacy. Galen makes him
say, “We know the nature of medicaments and simples, and make many
different preparations with them; some in one way, some in another.
Some simples must be gathered early, some late; some we dry, some we
crush, some we cook,” &c. He made fomentations, poultices, gargles,
pessaries, katapotia (things to swallow, large pills), ointments, oils,
cerates, collyria, looches, tablets, and inhalations, which he called
perfumes. For quinsy, for example, he burned sulphur and asphalte with
hyssop. He gave narcotics, including, it is supposed, the juice of
the poppy and henbane seeds, and mandragora; purgatives, sudorifics,
emetics, and enemas. His purgative drugs were generally drastic ones:
the hellebores, elaterium, colocynth, scammony, thapsia, and a species
of rhamnus.
Hippocrates describes methods for what he calls purging the head and
the lungs, that is, by means of sneezing and coughing. He explains how
he diminishes the acridity of spurge juice by dropping a little of it
on a dried fig, whereby he gets a good remedy for dropsy. He has a
medicine which he calls Tetragonon, or four-cornered. Galen conjectures
that this was a tablet of crude antimony. Leclerc more reasonably
suggests that it was a term for certain special kinds of lozenges, and
points out that not long after Hippocrates physicians used a trochiscus
trigonus, or three-cornered lozenge for another purpose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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