“Sprengel pense que Asclépiade, surnommé Pharmacion, est le premier qui ait conseillé les excréments humains; mais il est probable qu’il ne fit qu’ériger en préceptes écrits un usage déjà consacré en Orient, particulièrement en Egypte.”—(“Bib. Scat.,” pp. 29, 30.) The earliest writer whose works have been consulted was Hippocrates, termed the “Father of Medicine,” born 460 B.C. “He was a member of the family of the Asclepiadæ, ... and a descendant of both Esculapius and Hercules. He was born of a family of priest-physicians, and was the first to throw superstition aside, and to base the practice of medicine on the principles of inductive philosophy.”—(“Encyclopædia Britannica.”) Galen wrote a series of commentaries upon his writings. Medical commentators are not in accord as to how many of the works attributed to him are genuine; but the editions of the accepted and the suspected to be spurious are almost innumerable, and printed in every language of Europe. In the edition by Francis Adams (Sydenham Society, London, 1849), there is no mention of the use of human or animal excreta in pharmacy. But in another edition can be read that ass’s dung was given to restrain excessive catamenial flow.—(Kuhn’s edition, Leipsig, 1829, vol. i. p. 481.) Etmuller says that Hippocrates prescribed hawk-dung to aid in the expulsion of the fœtus and as a remedy for sterility (vol. ii. p. 285). The general use of excrementitious material in the medical practice of Hippocrates’ own day must be accepted from evidence deduced from outside sources. For example, Aristophanes, who was his contemporary (born 446 B.C., Encyc. Britan.), stigmatized all the medical fraternity as “excrement-eaters;” and Xenocrates, another practitioner of the same date, of whose writings, however, nothing has come down to us beyond the meagre outline to be found in the commentaries of Galen, made constant employment not only of human and animal excreta, but of all the secretions and excretions as well. According to Appleton’s Encyclopædia, Xenocrates was born 396 B.C. Schurig relates of Aristophanes that he called doctors “fecivores ... quod quidem adulatores fuerint quin excrementa Magnorum degustare voluerint.” He also says: “Quare de illo non inepte dixit quidam, eum dignum fuisse Xenocrates Medico, qui excrementis variis animalium omnes morbos curare solitus erat.”—(“Chylologia,” p. 82.) “Xenocrates, who flourished sixty years before Galen, had also a good list of nasty prescriptions, for which the veil of a dead language is required.” (“Saxon Leechdoms,” lib. i. p. xviii.) These included the urine of women and their catamenia. Aristophanes called the physicians of his time σκατοφάγους, or excrement-eaters. “Ce qui était plus malin que vrai, car les compères en faisaient manger à leurs clients plus qu’ils n’en mangeaient eux-mêmes.”—(“Bibliotheca Scatalogica.”)