Dr. Church, in an article in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports (vol. xx.), called “Our Hospital Pharmacopœia,” gives many interesting facts. The surgeons found their own drugs in 1549, and they were allowed £18 a year “because things pertaining to their faculty be very dear.” In a note appended to an old formula in the St. Bartholomew’s Pharmacopœia for a poultice, of which cow-dung was one ingredient, Dr. Church says: “Those who have not had the curiosity to look back at the old Pharmacopœias of the London Colleges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, can hardly imagine the disgusting nature of the substances they contained. In the catalogue of the official simples of our own London College for the year 1689 occur--‘Homo Vivens: Capilli, ungues, saliva, cerumen, sordes, sudor, urina, stercus, sanguis, calculi, semen, lac, menses, secundinæ. Homo mortuus: Cadaver caro, cutis, pinguedo, ossa, cranium, cerebrum, cor, fel, manus.’ And this at a time when R. Morton, Edward Tyson, Hans Sloane, and Richard Blackmore were Fellows of our College and Sydenham a Licentiate.... It is not until the fifth edition of the Pharmacopœia of our London College that we get rid of the old traditions handed down from the earliest periods of medicine. The 1746 Pharmacopœia may be said to mark a perfect revolution, or rather, I should say, reformation in the annals of pharmacy.” This purging of the Pharmacopœia of disgusting things, “for the most part superstitiously and doatingly derived from oracles, dreams, and astrological fancies,” was largely due to Dr. Plumptre, who was president of the College from 1740 to 1746, and the extent of it may be gained from the fact that the “simples,” which numbered 645 in the fourth edition, had, in the fifth, dwindled to 208. Many of the formulæ previously in use had been derived from the East, and notably from a learned pharmacologist called John of Damascus, concerning the date of whom authorities agree to differ. The complexity of some of the old formulæ was prodigious. The antidote of Matthiolus against poisons and plague contained 131 ingredients, and Venice treacle, which was largely prescribed by Sydenham and even later physicians, contained over sixty. In the sixth (1788) edition of the Pharmacopœia, sixty-three articles which appeared in the fifth edition were discontinued.