The formulas for some of these, consisting of twenty or more separate ingredients, were printed in the principal pharmacopoeias and were commonly made up by doctors and apothecaries for their own use and for sale. Dr. Pasteur and Dr. James Carter both ordered quantities of empty bottles for Stoughton’s and Daffy’s compounds. Dependence on imported patent medicines was a development that several observers deplored. Dr. Schoepf, for instance, thought American physicians should patriotically discontinue “making use almost wholly of foreign medicines, with which in large measure they might easily dispense, if they were willing to give their attention to home-products, informing themselves more exactly of the properties and uses of the stock of domestic medicines already known.” Jefferson in his _Notes on the State of Virginia_ had listed twenty-one medicinal plants native to the state, and others before him had commented on the abundance of simple remedies afforded by the woods and marshes of tidewater Virginia. Indeed, it appears that colonial medical men in the seventeenth century had gathered the largest part of their own medicines close at hand, and that the growing importation of patent mixtures was matched by an increasing export of native drugs. By the middle of the eighteenth century considerable quantities of at least eight medicinal plants were being shipped to England from Virginia, among them ipecacuanha, sassafras, balsam of Tolu, ginseng, and snakeroot. The last two formed the bulk of the export; of them more in a moment. [Illustration: _Seneca rattlesnake root or _Polygala Virginiana_ was a mainstay of medical treatment in eighteenth-century Virginia. The original source of this drawing has not been identified._] However, if there were in colonial towns “some apothecaries shops wainscotted or papered with advertisements, recommending quack medicines,” a large number of rural practitioners preferred to make up their remedies. “I do not apply to the Apothecaries Shops for my Means,” said the advertisement of one such, “I compact my own medicines myself. The produce of _Virginia_ Earth, with a few trifles besides, supports my Body, ... and many others besides, without bleeding, sweating, physicking, or Bitters.” Whether used from conviction that such means were better, or because the imported medicines were too expensive, the result was the same: such mild cures were less likely to interfere with the healing course of nature than did the complex, often drastic, and sometimes revolting compounds of the leading English physicians. From inventories of the estates of deceased apothecaries as well as from their newspaper advertisements comes evidence as to the equipment they kept and used in their shops. The remarkable thing is to see how little the essential items have changed over the course of the centuries—alike before and since the colonial era.