n.niVt '■'^ilHUtl PHARMACOLOGIC AN EXTENDED INQUIRY INTO THE OPERATIONS OF MEDICINAL BODIES, UPON WHICH ARE FOUNDED THEORY AND ART OF PRESCRIBING. J. A. PARIS, M.D., cantab. F.R.S., FELLOW OP THE ROYAL COLLEGE OP PHYSICIANS OF LONDON, AND LATE SENIOR PHYSICIAN TO THE WESTMINSTER HOSPITAL. PROM THE NINTH LONDON EDITION. REWRITTEN IN ORDER TO INCORPORATE THE LATEST DISCOVERIES IN PHYSI OLOGY, CHEMISTRY, AND MATERIA MEDICA. tth Jiotes, BY CHARLES A. LEE, M.D., A.M., LATE PROFESSOR (ELECT) OF MATERIA MEDICA AND MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE CITY OF NEW-YORK ; CONSULTING PHYSICIAN TO THE NORTHERN DISPENSARY OF NEW-YORK J MEMBER OF THE NEW-YORK LYCEUM OR. i%BgfilJL HISTORY, &C, &C, &C. A^ '*\ NEW-YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF-STREET. 1846. 1S-HF- Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1844, bj Harper & Brothers, ,7ji the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New-York. TO SIR BENJAMIN BRODIE, BART., F.R.S., SERGEANT-SURGEON TO HER MAJESTY, &C, &C My dear Sir Benjamin, If the expression of private regard could add point to a dedication, which derives its propriety from considerations of a public nature ; or were it necessary to justify the selection of a name, honourably stamp- ed as it is by the unanimous consent of our profession, I might well appeal to a friendship of years, and gratefully refer to that consummate skill, through which I am now living to acknowledge it; or I might recall the memory of our common friend, Dr. Maton, and plead all its cherished associations, as a personal motive for replacing his name by that of one who so long possessed his confidence, and enjoyed his friendship ; but you stand here recorded on a far loftier ground—you are selected as the representative of a class of philosophers who, by original research and skilful induction, have extended the boundaries of science, and applied its principles to the advancement of the heal- ing art. Your papers in the Philosophical Transactions are justly re- garded as having given a fresh impulse, and a novel direction, to a very important train of research, and to which many of the propositions contained in the following work may be said to have an intimate rela- tion : while your work on Calculous Diseases has enriched the pro- fession with improved methods of cure, and given a value to the chap- ter on Antilithic Remedies, without which it would have possessed but slender claims to practical utility. That you may long live to enjoy a reputation which is the noblest reward of talents usefully directed, and that the public may, for years to come, continue to derive comfort and alleviation from the active ex- ercise of them, is the humble prayer and fervent hope of Your grateful friend, John Ayrton Paris. Dover-street, January, 1843. TO MARTYN PAINE, M.D., PROFESSOR OF THE INSTITUTES OF MEDICINE AND MATERIA MEDICA IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE CITY OF NEW-YORK, Xu srcsttmons OF HIGH RESPECT FOR HIS DISTINGUISHED TALENTS ; FOR HIS PROFESSIONAL AND LITERARY ATTAINMENTS ; FOR HIS INDEFATIGABLE LABOURS, WHICH HAVE DONE HONOUR TO THB MEDICAL LITERATURE OF OUR COUNTRY; AND OF ESTEEM POR HIS PRIVATE VIRTUES, WHICH HAVE ENNOBLED HIM AS A MAN, THIS AMERICAN EDITION PHARMACOLOGIA is most respectfully dedicated, BY HIS SINCERE FRIEND, THE EDITOR PREFACE. When this work first appeared, in the year 1812, the public were in possession of several " Pharmaceutical Epitomes," " Compendiums," and " Vade-mecums," of creditable pretensions, compiled with the avowed objects of directing the practice of the junior, and of refreshing the memory of the more advanced practitioner. They furnished numerous prescriptions, and gave general directions with regard to the doses and effects of partic- ular medicines j and they were thus well enough adapted to re- lieve an occasional embarrassment, but they did not even attempt to point out the principles upon which a medicinal formula should be constructed, much less did they explain the part which each ingredient might be supposed to perform in its general arrange- ment. There were, moreover, several standard works on Mate- ria Medica, and approved systems of Pharmaceutic Chemistry j each of which imparted all the information which the science of the day could afford, with respect to the natural history, sensible qualities, chemical composition, and medicinal virtues of the several articles of the Materia Medica, as well as giving clear ex- planations of the various pharmaceutical operations by which such bodies might be rendered available as remedies 5 but here ended their instructions. They placed remedies in the hands of the pupil, but where was the work which would teach him to mix, combine, and direct their application in the form of an ex- temporaneous prescription'? where was the friendly Mentor to point out to the young practitioner the difficulties and dangers of his path 1 Amid all the perplexities of his novitiate, there is none more embarrassing than that of adapting a prescription to all the circumstances of a particular case with therapeutical pro- priety and chemical accuracy. On entering his career of prac- tice, he is necessarily abandoned to the alternative of two great evils—a servile routine on the one hand, and a lawless empiri- cism on the other. It was the want of such assistance to steer my way amid shoals and rocks that, more than thirty years since, first suggested the plan of the present work. Vlll PREFACE. As years have rolled on, the works of my younger days have been succeeded by others which have kept pace with the succes- sive discoveries of science, the increasing range of experience, and with those corrections of theory, and refinements of nomen- clature, which must be ever progressive with the advancement of knowledge. We may now be said to possess works whose authors have collected the scattered rays which emanate from every department of the sciences, in order to illuminate the ob- jects of their study. The Materia Medica of Pereira, and the Dispensary of Christison, lie on the table of every intelligent prac- titioner without a rival; so complete and accurate do I consider their " Special Pharmacology," that I shall for the future abstain from republishing the second part of my work, which, through eight editions, has been devoted to its investigation ; and for this omission, I offer the compensation of a much more extended view of that province, which I must continue to regard as peculiarly my own, for no author of the least repute has hitherto invaded it— The Philosophy of Medicinal Combination, from which alone can be deduced the Theory and Art of Prescribing. In the preface to my former editions, I observed that the authors of works profess- ing to guide the novice in his art had not escaped the too com- mon error of supposing " that the disciple was already grounded in first principles," and that " while they were in the ship of science^ they had forgotten he could not arrive without a boat." This obser- vation still remains in full force, and will explain my reasons for occasionally dwelling upon minutiae which might otherwise ap- pear trifling and unnecessary; but while I am thus most anxious " to catch the ideas which lead from ignorance to knowledge," it is not without a hope that I may also be able to suggest the means by which our acquired knowledge may be more widely and usefully extended; or, to follow up my figurative illustra- tion, "to furnish a boat which may not only convey the disciple to the ship, but which may also assist in piloting the ship herself from her shallow and treacherous moorings." The title-page announces that the work has been rewritten; this is true to the very letter; its fundamental doctrines have not been shaken, but so rapid and extraordinary has been the ad- vancement of every branch of science during the last ten years, that its very language has become obsolete ; a new Pharmaco- poeia had appeared during this interval, enriched with newly-dis- covered substances and novel preparations, and with a nomencla- ture radically changed. The science of chemistry had also, by the aid of quantitative analysis, assumed a new aspect; so that it was impossible, without remodelling the whole work, to render PREFACE. IX it consistent with the science of the day. Amid the later dis- coveries, those of Liebig will necessarily attract notice, several of which, published in his Agricultural work, have furnished me with facts of interesting application; at the same time, it is due to myself, as well as to my readers, to state, that nearly the whole of my work had been printed before I received a copy of his " Animal Chemistry" which will explain my silence regarding several of those theories that bear directly against opinions which I have confidently maintained, and are more especially in opposi- tion to those relating to the process of digestion. Liebig, captiva- ted with his theory of transformation, enlists it at once into his ser- vice to explain the phenomena of this process. He denies the exist- ence of any distinct digestive principle, and maintains that the change which the food undergoes in the stomach is the result of in- duction, from the stomach itself yielding a substance in the state of transformation, with which it comes in contact: all experiment is opposed to this view; Schwann actually proved that the prin- ciple of the gastric solvent could be precipitated by acetate of lead from its neutral solution, and again recovered from the precipi- tate, with all its former activity, by hydro-sulphuric acid. In addition to which evidence, the observations of Dr. Beaumont, as related at page 163, appear to me to be decisive. Those only who have watched with parental anxiety the prog- ress of a favourite work through numerous editions, can duly appreciate the feelings of the author, who, after a long interval, is called upon to revise or remodel it. If, like the one before me, science has been profusely pouring forth her treasures to enrich the subjects upon which it treats, they are, to speak in the language of Priestley, " the most exquisite that can be imagined, since an object in which we see a perpetual progress and improvement is, as it were, continually rising in its magnitude ; and, moreover, when we see an actual increase, in a long period of time past, we cannot help forming an idea of an unlimited increase in futu- rity ;" but such pleasure comes not without its alloy: Time is sure to work his bitter commission ; during the last few years, how many friends, identified in my own mind with the progress and success of this work, have sunk into the grave ! My respect- ed friend and publisher, William Phillips, has paid the debt of nature, and the tomb has closed over that accomplished natural- ist and distinguished physician, by whose friendship I was hon- oured from a very early period of life, and whose name graced the page of this work for more than a quarter of a century. Salve et vale. B PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. The Editor deems it unnecessary to say a word in commendation of the following work, as no medical publication of the age has probably had a more extended circulation. The former American editions, of which several have from time to time appeared, are now entirely out of print, and the frequent demands for the work have in- duced the present publishers to bring out the present edition, which has been entirely rewritten, and adapted to the present state of chem- ical and physiological science. It is the only treatise in the English language which gives a full and extended view of the Philosophy of Medicinal Combination, as it is the only one from which can be satis- factorily deduced the true Theory and Art of Prescribing. It is this feature which renders it indispensable to the student, as well as the practitioner, who would study medicine as a science as well as an art, and who would elevate his practice above the dangers and uncer tainties of blind empiricism. Charles A. Lee 401 Hudson-street, New-York, i Nov. 18,1843. f CONTENTS. PART I. REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF THE MATERIA MEDICA. Page Introductory Reflections...........1 Superstition.—Credulity.—Skepticism.—False Theory.—Devotion to Authority and Established Routine.—The assigning to Art that which was the Effect of unas- sisted Nature.—Ambiguity of Nomenclature.—The Progress of Botanical Science. —The Application and Misapplication of Chemical Science.—The Influence of Soils, Climate, and Seasons.—The unseasonable Collection of Vegetable Reme- dies.—The Adulteration of Drugs.—The Obscurity attending the Operation of Compound Medicines...........9-81 PART II. ON THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL ACTION OF MEDICINAL SUB- STANCES. Definition and General Remarks..........85 The Channels or Modes of Communication through which Medicinal Bodies may act upon the Solids and Fluids of the System.......87 1. On Remedies conveyed by Absorption, without Decomposition . . .87 2. On Remedies conveyed, with Decomposition.......92 Laws relating to such Decomposition ........ 94 3. On Remedies which act by Nervous transmission......98 4. On Remedies which act through the sympathetic Agency of the Stomach . 100 5. On Remedies which act by the Operation of contiguous Sympathy or conti- nuity of Structure . . .........102 Cullen's Arrangement of the Materia Medica . .......104 Classification of Dr. Murray, with Modifications.......105 1. General Stimulants...........106 Exhilarants..............108 Narcotics..............109 Contra-Stimulants, or Sedatives..........Ill Antispasmodics.............112 Tonics...............114 Astringents..............118 2. Local or Special Stimulants.........123 Emetics..............123 Cathartics..............129 Emmenagogues.............132 Diuretics..............133 Diaphoretics..............139 Expectorants............. 143 Sialagogues..............148 Counter-irritants.............150 3. Chemical Remedies...........154 a Whether the Diving Body can be Chemically supplied with such Materials as may be deficient ............. 160 With respect to the Gastric Secretions . . . . . . . .160 With respect to the Elements of the Blood.......165 b Whether we can Neutralize or Decompose offending Materials . . . .167 Antacids.............173 Antilithics.............197 Antidotes.............175 Escharotics.............216 c Whether we can Oppose or Counteract the Ascendency of Chemical Forces in the Living Body.............190 Antiseptics. ...........190 d Whether we can Regulate the Animal Temperature by Chemical means . .169 Refrigerants.............169 Xll CONTENTS. P»g» 218 4 Mechanical Remedies..... .....„,„ Anthelmintics............ Demulcents............. Diluents............. Emollients Laxatives Alteratives 219 221 222 224 224 224 PART III. ON THE THEORY AND ART OF PRESCRIBING. Introductory Remarks . . . • • ••,•,•..• ' ' oH The Combinations of Nature considered with reference to those ot Art . . . ziv An Analysis of the Objects to be attained by mixing and combining Medicinal Officinal and Magistral, or Extemporaneous Formulae . . . . • .232 First Object. To promote the Action of the Basis of a Formula . . 233 a By combining several different Forms or Preparations of the same Medicine . . 233 b By combining similar Medicines . . ■ • ■ • • • "34 c By combining different Medicines, which have been found by Experience to render the System more susceptible of the Action of the Basis......240 Second Object. To correct the Operation of the Basis . . . .246 a By mechanically separating, or chemically neutralizing, the offending Ingredient . 246 6 By adding some Substance capable of guarding the Stomach or System against its Effects..............249 Third Object. To obtain the joint Operation of two or more Medicines 252 a By combining those Medicines which may prodtice the same ultimate Effects, although by totally different Modes of Operation....... • _ • 252 6 By combining Medicines which have entirely different Powers, and which are required to obviate different Symptoms, or to answer different Indications .... 253 Fourth Object. To obtain a New and Active Remedy, not afforded by any single Substance...........260 a By associating Medicines which excite different Actions in the Stomach and System, in consequence of rvhich new or modified Results are produced .... 260 6 By combining Substances which have the property of acting chemically upon each other, the result of which is The Formation of New Compounds.......261 The Development of Active Principles.......263 c By combining Substances between which no other change is induced than that of Solubility.............266 1"ifth Object. To afford an eligible Form.......271 a With reference to its Efficacy..........271 b With reference to its Aspect or Flavour........272 c With reference to its Preservation.........273 On the different Parts of a Medicinal Formula........276 On the Doses of Medicines...........277 Circumstances by which their Effects are modified.......279 Age—Sex—Temperament—Constitutional Power—Habit — Diet — Profession— Climate and Season—Nature and Duration of Disease—Time of the Day—Idio- syncrasy—Influence of Imagination—Variable Activity of the Medicine . 279-284 Precepts with regard to the Art of writing a Prescription.....286 The Chemical and Pharmaceutical Errors which may be committed in the Compo- sition of Extemporaneous Formulae.........288 a The methods directed for the preparation of the Ingredients are either inade- quate to the accomplishment of the object, or they change and destroy their efficacy..............288 b Substances are added together which are incapable of mixing, or of forming compounds of uniform and suitable consistence......290 c Substances are added together which mutually decompose each other; whence the original virtues of one or more of the active Ingredients are changed, or altogether lost............292 Question 1. Any given Substance having united with another, supposed to be in- compatible with it, whether the resulting body be equally and similarly active as a Medicine?..............297 Question 2. In cases of Decomposition, whether the products of Exchange be anal- ogous in medicinal effect, and equivalent in energy to the original Ingredients? 299 Question 3. Whether the New Products, arising from decomposition, although insoluble in the vial, may not become soluble in the juices of the stomach, or un- dergo such farther changes in the System as may render them medicinally active? 305 Synoptical Tables of Incompatible Substances, and the Results of their Inter- mixture ...............307 CONTENTS. Xiii Pago On the particular Forms of Remedies, and the general Principles upon which their Construction and Administration should be regulated......318 Simple and Compound Powders.........318, 319 Pills...............321 Trochisci, or Lozenges...........324 Electuaries..............324 Clysters..............328 Injections..............329 Inhalations..............330 Remedies of External Application— Plasters...............333 Ointments..............336 Liniments..............337 Lotions...............337 Cataplasms..............338 Blisters................ 340 Key Letters, with an Explanation of their Use........341 A Synoptical Table of the Principles of Medicinal Combination .... 344 Illustrative Formulae.............345 PART I. REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF THE MATERIA MEDICA. REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF THE MATERIA MEDICA. To the medical philosopher there exist but few objects of deeper in- terest than an extensive and well-arranged cabinet of Materia Medica.* What lessons of practical wisdom lie stored within its narrow recesses ! How many reminiscences may the contemplation of it call forth, and how many beacons for future guidance may it not afford! Its records are the symbols of medical history—the accredited registers of departed systems, founded on ideal assumptions, and of superstitions engendered by fear and nurtured by ignorance. In its earlier specimens, as from a collection of antique medals, we read the revolutions of the past, and, in the space of a few minutes, recall the exploded theories of as many centuries ; for to these archives have the various sects, which from time to time have held dominion, bequeathed some striking memorial, or left some characteristic trace of their vain and transient existence. With no less interest than instruction will the young practitioner, entering upon his professional career, regard such a collection. In casting his eyes over so extensive and motley an assemblage of substances, he will be forci- bly impressed with the palpable absurdity of some, the disgusting and loathsome nature of others, the total inactivity of many, and the uncer- tain and precarious reputation of all; and he will be naturally impelled, by an eager and laudable curiosity, to inquire how it can have happened that substances, at one period in the highest esteem, and of generally- acknowledged utility, should have ever fallen into total neglect or dis- repute ; why others, of humble pretensions and little significance, should have maintained their ground for so many centuries ; and by what ca- price or accident materials of no energy whatever should have continued to receive the indisputable sanction and unqualified support of the best and wisest practitioners of the age; and, above all, he will inquire by what necromantic spell certain medicinal substances, after having run their appointed course of trial, and been fairly denounced,as inert or useless, could ever again have been raised into especial favour, as if but to sink once more into deeper and more lasting discredit. That such fluctuations in opinion, and versatility in practice, should have produced, in the most candid minds, an unfavourable impression and misgiving with regard to the reputed efficacy of medicine, can scarcely excite our surprise, and much less justify our indignation. Nor ought we to feel astonished that a less intelligent portion of man- kind, or such as are incapable of deep inquiry, should at once have been led to arraign physic as a fallacious art, or to deride it as a tissue of * The College of Physicians possesses a very complete cabinet. That collected by Dr. Burgess, and presented to the College after his death by Mr. Brande, to whom it had been bequeathed, has been collated with that of Dr. Coombe, purchased for that purpose. 2 REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY craft and delusion.* They ask, and it must be confessed that they ask with reason, what pledge can be given that the boasted remedies ot tne present day will not, like their predecessors, fall into disrepute, and, in their turn, serve only as humiliating memorials of the credulity and in- fatuation of those who may have commended their virtues or directed their application. There is surely no question connected with the pres- ent work more interesting or important, for it assails us upon the very threshold of the porch ; nor can there be one which requires a more cool and dispassionate inquiry, for it is surrounded by fallacies, and[ob- scured by discrepant testimony ; and there is certainly not any which can present so many points of instruction, for it is thus that we read the lessons of experience, and render the errors of the past the means of improving the future. I therefore propose to take a rapid and sweeping sketch of the different moral and physical causes which have operated in swaying the opinions of the practitioner, and in producing those rev- olutions which have taken place in the belief of mankind with regard to the power and efficacy of different medicinal substances; and 1 confi- dently hope that I may thus be enabled to remove many unjust prejudi- ces, to quiet the doubts and alarms which have been so industriously propagated, and at the same time, by exposing the secret haunts of fal- lacy, to obviate the recurrence of error, and to diminish the chances of future disappointment. This moral view of events, without any regard to historical details or chronological minutiae, may be denominated the Philosophy of His- tory, and should be carefully distinguished from that technical and bar- ren erudition which consists in little else than a dry record of names and dates; the one expands and trains the reasoning faculties to sound reflection, while the other is perused by the medical student with about as much interest, and perhaps as little profit, as the monk counts his bead-roll. It has been very justly observed, that there is a certain maturity of the human mind, acquired from generation to generation, in the mass, as there is in the different stages of life in the individual man: what is history, when thus philosophically studied, but the faithful record of this progress ; pointing out for instruction the various causes which have ac- celerated, retarded, or obstructed it, in different ages and countries?' Thus is our art, in its earlier periods, like the young and sanguine prac- titioner, characterized by an excess of credulity: every object is tinted with imaginative hues, and magnified in the mist of the dawn; we find, for instance, the early herbals assigning almost incredulous virtues to every herb of the field, while in the present day the list of those which are admitted to possess any real efficacy is reduced to the limit of a few slender pages. Just so is it with the career of the individual. " When I was young," said Dr. Radcliffe, " I possessed at least twenty remedies for every disease, but when advanced in age I found twenty diseases without a single remedy;" or, in other words—for we must not suffer a striking antithesis, by seducing the ear, to mislead the judgment__his imagination had been tempered by reason, and his early credulity subdued * A late foreign writer, impressed with this sentiment, has given the followins flattering definition of our profession : " Physic is the art of amusing the patient, while Nature cures the disease. This is a sarcasm which can only be equalled by the churlish and ill-hu- moured apostrophe of our own Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, in speaking of the profession of physic, exclaims, " it is a melancholy attendance on misery: a mean submission to Dee- vishness; and a continual interruption of pleasure." OF THE MATERIA MEDICA. 3 by long experience. The mirror of history casts its lights as well as its shadows. It discovers fallacies that may mortify our untaught con- ceit, but it as surely displays truths which must gratify our pride, inspire our hopes, and give a keener edge to our exertions. Historians have ever been ambitious of tracing back their subjects to the most remote antiquity, and medical writers have not manifested less eagerness to discover the origin of their art; but in every attempt to thread the stream to its source, we are soon lost in the wilds of con- jecture, or in the regions of fable ; indeed, it is very unlikely that we should be able, by the most indefatigable research, to approach the pe- riod when remedies were first applied for the alleviation of bodily suf- fering, or to discover any country, however uncivilized, in which its na- tive inhabitants are destitute of medical resources. Amid the most savage tribes of Africa, New Holland, New Zealand, Lapland, and North America, some rude indications of the arts of medicine and sur- gery have ever been discovered. The painful feelings of the sufferer, and the anxiety of those about him, must, in the most barbarous state, have incited a spirit of inquiry and trial to procure relief;* and when ordinary expedients! failed, charms,| amulets, and incantations would be the natural resources of the barbarian, who is ever inclined to indulge in the mysteries of superstition. Traces of amulets may be discovered in the earliest history. The learned Dr. Warburton is evidently mistaken when he assigns the origin of these magical in- struments to the age of the Ptolemies, which was not more than three hundred years before Christ; this is at once refuted by the testimony of Galen, who tells us that the Egyptian king, Nechepsus, who lived six hundred and thirty years before the Christian era, had written that a green jasper cut into the form of a dragon surrounded with rays, if applied externally, would strengthen the stomach and organs of diges- tion.§ We have, moreover, the authority of the Scriptures in support of this opinion; for what were the ear-rings which Jacob buried under the oak of Sechem, as related in Genesis, but amulets ? And we are informed by Josephus, in his history of the Jews,|| that Solomon dis- covered a plant efficacious in the cure of epilepsy, and that he employ- ed the aid of a charm or spell for the purpose of assisting its virtues. The root of the herb was concealed in a ring, which was applied to the nostrils of the demoniac; and Josephus remarks that he himself saw a * Some writers have so far trifled with the subject as to have made it a question of grave inquiry, whether medicine or surgery can claim the higher antiquity ? According to Sex- tus Empiricus, the earliest exercise of the art was that of extracting arrows, and hence he derives from lbs, an arrow, the larpos of the Greeks. Previous to the establishment of the Alexandrian school, about three centuries before the Christian era, all the branches of physic and surgery were practised by the same person, the largos of the Greeks correspond- ing with the general practitioner of the present day. t The application of the reeking entrails of a recently-slain animal appears to have been one of the earliest means adopted for the relief of pain; and it is not more than two cen- turies since Dr. Butler, of Cambridge, ordered a cow to be killed, and his patient to be placed in the warm carcass.—Aubrey's MSS. in Ashmole's Museum. X The words " Incantation" and " Charm" appear to be derived from the ancient practice of curing diseases by poetry and music (Carmen). Thus Ccelius Aurelianus, "decantare loca dolentia." Democritus says that many diseases are capable of being cured by the sound of a flute, when properly played. Marianus Capellus assures us that fevers may be cured by appropriate songs. Asclepiades actually employed the trumpet for the relief of sciatica, and tells us that it is to be continued until the fibres of the part begin to palpitate, when the pain will vanish. . . s Professor Leslie, "is the close inspection and attentive exam ination of those phenomena which arise in the course of nature- ExpfrimpvI , T term implies consists in a kind of trial, or artificial selection and combinat on of circum stances for the purpose of searching after the remote results " The nhilowLw Ik fore, who observes, may be said to listen to nature, while hp wVm »™~,- "™u>"ler> mere- her. Herschel, however, very justly states, that, by thus distin°u sCTnh*' lntferroSates experiment, it is by no means intended to place them in" an,kmd of cLtr^T^ "T they are much alike, and differ rather in degree than in kmd lat hi rh^if ? iY be better to express their distinction by the terms passive and aaL observanon ""^ $ The refractive power ofan inflammable body bears also a DroDortiont^ite'^ r .■ whence it may be sometimes used as a test of itsf purity ThWvwi «■ perfection, genuine oil of cloves had a refractive power of 1535, while hat nf'^? f n found that not exceed 1-498. ' hat ot an inferior quality did || It is indeed true that Sir John Herschel has lately presented n<* win, ti u- medical discovery, which might vie with the most triumphantex"mrXL? phlSt°ry °f a duction; but Sir John is sanguine, I will not say credulous Th» a I Baconlan m- receive the account of it in his own words : " A soap mannfWn,.!, reader' however, shall siduum of his ley, when exhausted of the alkali for which W™S retnarks',lhat the re- rosion of his copper boiler, for which he cannot account Hp n»f F- I V™*"™* a cor- scientific chemist for analysis, and the result is the discovp™„? \ i u the hands of a and important chemical elements, iodine. The properties ofthi. k t4heJm°st angular to concur most appositely in illustration and support of a varietv of™8 studled' are found structive views then gaining ground in chemistry, and thus e^rci^r^ked influtnca OF THE MATERIA MEDICA. 7 every problem which involves the phenomena of life is unavoidably em- barrassed by circumstances, so complicated in their nature, and fluctua- ting in their operation, as to set at defiance every attempt to exclude their presence, to neutralize their influence, or to appreciate, and allow for, the extent of their operation ; an observation or experiment upon the effects of a medicine is thus liable to a thousand fallacies, unless it be carefully repeated under all the varying circumstances of health and disease, in different climates, and on different constitutions. We all know how very differently opium or mercury will act upon different in- dividuals, or even upon the same individual at different times, or under different circumstances; the effect of a stimulant upon the living body is not in the ratio of the intensity of its impulse, but in proportion to the degree of vital susceptibility or excitability of the individual to whom it is applied. This is illustrated in a clear and familiar manner by the very different sensations of heat which the same temperature will pro- duce under different circumstances. In the road over the Andes, at about half way between the foot and the summit, there is a cottage, in which the ascending and descending travellers meet; the former, who have just quitted the sultry valleys at the base, are so relaxed that the sudden dimi- nution of temperature produces in them the feeling of intense cold ; while the latter, who have left the frozen summits of the mountain, are over- come by the distressing sensation of extreme heat. But we need not climb the Andes for illustration; if we plunge one hand into a basin of hot, and the other into one of cold water, and then mix the contents of each vessel, and replace both hands in the mixture, we shall experi- ence the sensation of heat and cold from one and the same medium ; the hand that had been previously in the hot will feel cold, while that which had been immersed in the cold water will experience a sensation of heat. Upon the same principle, ardent spirits will produce very op- posite effects upon different constitutions and temperaments, and in dif- ferent conditions of the body. In a state of health they will always in- crease the strength and frequency of the natural pulse, whereas in dis- ease, by giving power, they may reduce its frequency. Aliment, also, which, under ordinary circumstances, would occasion but little effect, may, in certain conditions of the system, act as powerful stimulants; a fact well exemplified by the history of persons who have been enclosed in a coal-mine for several days without food, from the accidental falling in of the surrounding strata, when they have been as much excited by a basin of broth as a person, under common circumstances, would have been by one or more bottles of wine.* Many instances will suggest over the whole body of that science. Curiosity is excited; the origin of the new sub- stance is traced to the sea-plant from whose ashes the principal ingredient of soap is obtained, and ultimately to the sea-water itself. It is thence hunted through nature, discovered in salt mines and springs, and pursued into all bodies which have a marine origin ; among the rest, into sponge A medical practitioner (Dr. Coindet, of Geneva) then calls to mind a reputed remedy for the cure of one of the most grievous and unsightly disorders to which the human species is subject—the goitre—which infests the inhabitants of mountainous districts to an extent that in this favoured land we have, happily, no experience of, and which was said to have been originally cured by the ashes of burned sponge. Led by this indication, he tries the effect of iodine on that complaint, and the result establishes the ex traordinary fact, that this singular substance, taken as a medicine, acts with the utmost promptitude and energy on goHre, dissipating the largest and most inveterate in a short time and acting (of course, like all medicines, even the most approved, with occasional failures) as a specific or natural antagonist against that odious deformity." * Elizabeth Woodcock, who was buried in the snow for the space of eight days in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, and whom I frequently visited, died in consequence of the stimulants which she could not resist, and which in her peculiar state of excitement she 8 REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF THE MATERIA MEDICA. themselves to the practitioner in farther illustration of these views, and I shall have occasion, in a future part of the work, to recur to the sub ject, in order to show its immense importance in guiding and modifying our practice. f To such causes we may principally attribute the barren labours oi the ancient empirics, who saw without discerning, administered with- out discriminating, and concluded without reasoning; nor should we be surprised at the very imperfect state of the materia medica, as far as it depends upon what is commonly called experience, complicated as it is by its numberless relations with physiology, pathology, and chemistry, and obnoxious as it must ever be to all the prejudices of opinion, and to the illusions even of sense. John Ray attempted to enumerate the vir- tues of plants from experience, and the system serves only to commemo- rate his failure.* Vogel likewise professed to assign to substances those powers which had been learned from repeated observation, or, in other words, from accumulated experience; and he speaks of roasted toad\ as a specific for the pains of gout, and asserts that a person may secure himself for the whole year from angina by eating a roasted swal- low ! Such must ever be the case, when medicines derive their origin from false experience, and their reputation from blind credulity. Analogy has undoubtedly been a powerful instrument in the im- provement, extension, and correction of the materia medica, but it has been chiefly confined to modern times ; for, in the earlier ages, chemis- try had not so far unfolded the composition of bodies as to furnish any just idea of their relation to each other ; nor had the science of botany taught us the value and importance of those natural affinities which ex- ist in the vegetable kingdom ; but these, again, are subjects to which I shall have occasion hereafter to recur. Nor has experiment been ex- empt from fallacy. If an experiment be regarded as a question ad- dressed to Nature, it is evident, in order to avoid fallacy, that it is not only necessay it should be fairly and correctly stated, but that the re- sponse should be fully and correctly comprehended, or, like the oracles of old, it will only serve to puzzle and mislead us. As in the ordinary affairs of life nothing is more difficult than so to frame a searching ques- tion as to elicit an unembarrassed truth, so in philosophy, to contrive an experiment that shall give an unequivocal result, presupposes such an acquaintance with every probable interference as can only be possible in an advanced state of knowledge. In addition to the obstacles already enumerated, the progress of our knowledge with respect to the virtues of medicines has met with others of a moral character, which have deprived us in a great degree of an ob- vious method of research, and rendered our dependance upon testimony- uncertain, and often entirely fallacious. The human understanding, as Lord Bacon justly remarks, is not a mere faculty of apprehension, but is was unable to bear. In the first volume of the Memoirs of the Philosophical Society of Manchester, a case of a miner is recorded, who, after remaining for eight days without food, was killed by being placed in a warm bed, and fed with chicken-broth. * It may be doubted whether it were superstition, or some fanciful speculation, which led Dioscorides to arrange the articles of the Materia Medica, in his celebrated work "Iltpt r\ns larpiKtjs" according to the similarity of sound in the names of the articles de- scribed. Thus medium was placed with epimedium ; althcea cannabina, with cannabis; hip- pophaxtum, with hippophce, and so on, the separation of aromatic and gum bearing trees esculents and corn-plants, hardly forming an exception to this statement.—Am. Ed° t For this purpose it appears that the toad was baked alive. The following is the re- ceipt in Colborne's Dispensatory: "Bvfo praparatus. Put the toads alive in an eaithen pot, and dry them in an oven moderately heated, until they become tit to be powdered.'' SUPERSTITION. 9 affected more or less by the will and the passions ; what man wishes to be true, that he too easily believes to be so, and I humbly conceive that, of all the sciences, Physic has the least pretensions to proclaim itself independent of such an influence. Let us, then, proceed to investigate the revolutions and vicissitudes which remedies have undergone in medical as well as popular opinion, from the ignorance of some ages, the learning of others, from the super- stitions of the weak, and the designs of the crafty ; classing them under the prominent causes which have produced them, viz., Superstition; Credulity ; Skepticism ; False Theory ; Devotion to Authority and Es- tablished Routine ; the assigning to Art that which was the effect of unassisted Nature ; the assigning to peculiar Substances properties de- duced from Experiments made on inferior Animals; Ambiguity of Nomenclature ; the Progress of Botanical Science ; the application and misapplication of Chemical Philosophy; the Influence of Climate and Season on Diseases, as well as on the Properties of their Remedies; the unseasonable collection of Medicines of Vegetable Origin ; the ig- norant preparation or fraudulent adulteration of Medicines, and the ob- scurity which has attended the operation of Compound Remedies. SUPERSTITION. A belief in the interposition of supernatural powers in the pre- vention and cure of disease has prevailed in every age and coun- try, in an inverse ratio with its state of civilization, or in exact proportion to its want of knowledge. "In the opinion of the ig- norant multitude," says Lord Bacon, "witches and impostors have always held a competition with physicians." Galen also com- plains of this circumstance, and observes that his patients were more obedient to the oracle in the Temple of Esculapius, or to their own dreams, than they were to his prescriptions. The same popular imbecility is evidently allegorized in the mythology of the ancient poets, when they made both Esculapius and Circe the children of Apollo. In truth, there is an unaccountable propensity in the human mind, unless subjected to u very long course of dis- cipline, to indulge in the belief of what is improbable and super- natural; and this is perhaps more conspicuous with respect to physic than to any other affair of common life, both because the nature of diseases and the art of curing them are more obscure, and because disease necessarily awakens fear, and fear and igno- rance are the natural parents of superstition. Every disease, there- fore, th • origin and cause of which did not immediately strike the senses, has in all ages been attributed by the ignorant to the wrath of Heaven, to the resentment of some invisible demon, or to some malignant aspect of the stars;* and hence the introduction of a * The plague of London was supposed to have arisen from such a cause, as we leam from the writers of that period. I shall quote a passage from a pamphlet by W. Kemp, M.A , dedicated to Charles the Second. " One cause of breeding the pestilence is that corruption of the air which is occasioned by the influence of the stars, by the aspects, con- junctions, and oppositions of the planets, by the eclipses of the sun and moon, and by the consequences of comets." " Astra regunt homines, sed regit astra Deus." Hippocrates ad- 10 superstition. rabble of superstitious remedies, not a few of which were rather considered as expiations at the shrines of offended spirits, than as natural agents possessing medicinal powers. The introduction of precious stones into the Materia Medica arose from an Arabian superstition of this kind ; indeed, De Boot, who has written exten- sively upon this subject, does not pretend to account for the vir- tues of gems upon any philosophical principle, but from their be- ing the residence of spirits; and he adds, that such substances, from their beauty, splendour, and value, are well adapted as recep- tacles for good spirits.* Every substance whose origin is involved in mysteryf has at different times been eagerly applied to the purposes of medicine. Some years since, one of those showers, which are now known to consist of the excrements of insects, fell in the north of Italy ; the inhabitants regarded the substance as manna, or some supernatural panacea, and they swallowed it with such avidity, that it was only by extreme address a small quantity could be obtained for a chem- ical examination. A propensity to attribute every ordinary and natural effect to some extraordinary and unnatural cause, is one of the striking characteristics of medical superstition ; it seeks also explanations from the most preposterous agents, when obvious and natural ones are in readiness to solve the problem. Soranus, for instance, who was contemporary with Galen, and wrote the life of Hippocrates, tells us that honey proved an easy remedy for the aphthae of chil- dren ; but instead of at once referring the fact to the medical qual- ities of honey, he very gravely explains it, from its having been taken from bees that hived near the tomb of Hippocrates ! And even those salutary virtues which many herbs possess were, in those times of superstitious delusion, attributed rather to the planet under whose ascendency they were collected or prepared, than to any natural and intrinsic properties in the plants themselves ; in- deed, such was the supposed importance of planetary influence,:}: vises his son Thessalus to study numbers and geometry (Epist. ad Thessalum), because says he, the rising and setting of the stars have a great effect upon distempers'. Citois' the historian of the celebrated Colic of Pokou (Colica Pictonum), which ra»ed with such epidemic fury in that province during the sixteenth century drops a hint, apparently with a view to account for the origin of the disease, viz., that, to the great astonishment of as- trologers, " a new star had, in the same year, made its appearance in the constellation of Cassiopeia." (Diatnba de novo et populan, apud Pictones, dolore colico bilioso) This temporary star, observed by Cornelius Gemma, was said to have been so bright as to have been seen at noonday. * The precious stones were at first only used as amulets, or external charms • but like many other articles of the Materia Medica, they passed, by a mistake in the mode of their application, from the outside to the inside of the body, and they were accordingly now dered and administered as specifics An analogous case of the perverted administration of a popular remedy is afforded in the history of the tench, which Sennertus describes as a remedy capable of curing the jaundice, which he allows is effected " by secret attraction and the power of amulets." In the course of time it became a reputed food in the cm-P of that disease, and tench broth was prescribed upon all such occasions Old Isaac Wa I ton has some curious observations upon the remedial power of the tench paLKSytnru^ L,r," Of this trlth the history of M^s. B*^,^£££S^%«£ ample; while kept secret, everybody believed it infallible, but no sooner was its composi- tion divulged, than it fell into neglect and disuse; and who can doubt that, the fame of the homoeopathic doctnne has not arisen from its being perfectly unintelligible ? X Paracelsus exclaims, " Stellas terrenas esse Plantas, quae caelestes plantas, i e StP] las, respiciant, ita ut quaevis planta suam habeat stellam specificam." ' '' superstition. II that it was usual to prefer to receipts a symbol of the planet under whose reign the ingredients were to be collected; and it is, per- haps, not generally known, that the character which we at this day place at the head of our prescrip- tions, and which is understood to mean nothing more than Recipe, is, in fact, a relict of the astro- logical symbol of Jupiter, as may be seen in many of the older works on pharmacy; although it is at present so disguised by the addition of the down stroke, which converts it into the letter R, that, were it not for its cloven foot, we might be led to question its superstitious origin.* A knowledge of this ancient and popular belief in sidereal influ- ence will enable us to explain many superstitions in physic. The custom, for instance, of administering carthartic medicines at stated periods and seasons, originated in an impression of their being more active and necessary at particular stages of the moon, or at certain conjunctions of the planets. A remnant of this supersti- tion still exists to a considerable extent in Germany ; and the prac- tice of bleeding at " spring and fall," so long observed in this coun- try, owed its existence to a similar belief. Our Saxon ancestors relied much upon bleeding, but its success was supposed to depend very greatly upon the selection of the day, whether good or evil, upon which it was performed; and the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts contain lists of the attributes of each day of the lunar month, as they were supposed to be good or evil, for the administration of remedies. It was in consequence of the same superstition that the metals were first distinguished by the names and signs of the plan- ets; and as the latter were supposed to hold dominion over time, so were astrologers led to believe that some, more than others, had an influence on certain days of the week ; and, moreover, that they could impart to the corresponding metals considerable efficacy upon the particular days which were devoted to them. From this same belief some bodies were only prepared on certain days in the year; the celebrated earth of Lemnos was, as Galen describes, periodical- ly dug with great ceremony, and it continued for many ages to be highly esteemed for its virtues; even at this day, the pit in which The Druids of Gaul and Britain, who were both priests and physicians, gathered and cut the mistletoe with a golden knife, only when the moon was six days old; and being af- terward consecrated by certain forms, it was considered as an antidote to poisons, and a pre- ventive of sterility.—Plinii, lib. xvi., c. xliv. The vervain (Verbena Officinalis), after libations of honey, was to be gathered at the ri- sing of the dog-star, when neither sun nor moon shone, with the left hand only; when thus prepared, it was said to vanquish fevers and other distempers, was an antidote to the bite of serpents, and a charm to conciliate friendship.—Plin., lib. xxv., c. ix. I shall, how- ever, hereafter show that the medicinal reputation of this herb derived its origin from a source more ancient even than that of Druidism. Magnenus (Exercitat. de Tabaco) has given us the following precept: " Tabacum seratur luna crescente, colligatur autem decres- cente luna." From Shakspeare we receive illustrations on every subject. See Friar Law- rence's speech in Romeo and Juliet, act ii., sc. hi. * Mesue commenced all his prescriptions with the words, " In nomine Dei." In later times the heathen symbols were dropped, and others were substituted to propi- tiate the favour and assistance of Heaven. For this purpose, the alchemists stamped the figure of the cross upon the vessel in which they were to obtain their long-sought prize; a superstition from which the term Crucible derived its origin; although I am well aware that another derivation has been suggested, from crucio, since, in the language of the al- chemists, the crucible was the vessel in which the metals were tortured to force them lo assume the form of gold. 12 superstition. the clay is found is annually opened with solemn rites by the priests on the sixth day of August, six hours after sunrise, when a quantity is taken out, washed, dried, and then stamped with the Grand Seignor's seal, and sent to Constantinople. It was formerly death to open the pit, or to seal the earth, on any other day in the year. In the botanical history of the Middle Ages, as more especially developed in Macer's Herbal, there was not a plant of medicinal use that was not placed under the dominion of some planet, and must neither be gathered nor applied, but with observances that savoured of the most absurd superstition, and which we find were preserved, as late as the seventeenth century, by the astrological herbalists, Turner, Culpepper, and Lovel. It is not the least extraordinary feature in the history of medical superstition, that it should have so frequently involved in its tram- mels persons who, on every other occasion, would have resented with indignation any attempt to talk them out of their reason, and still more so to persuade them out of their senses; and yet we have continual proofs of its extensive influence over the most pow- erful and cultivated minds. In ancient times we might adduce the wise Cicero, and the no less philosophic Aurelius; while, in mod- ern days, we find that Lord Bacon,* with all his philosophy, be- trayed a disposition to believe in charms and amulets. It merits notice, that the medicinal celebrity of a substance has not unfrequently outlived the tradition of its superstitious origin, in the same manner that many of our popular customs and rites have continued, through a series of years, to exact a respectful observ- ance, although the circumstances that gave rise to them have been lost in the gloom of unrecorded ages. They are, as it were, the orphans of history, and would appear to rivet a regard from the very obscurity of their origin. Does not the fond parent still sus- pend the coral toy around the neck of her infant, without being in the least aware of the superstitious belieff from which the custom originated 1 while the chorus of Berry down is re-echoed by those who never heard of the Druids, much less of the choral hymns with which their groves resounded at the time of their gathering the * Lord Bacon believed in the existence of a panacea that would prolong life beyond its natural term. He considered that one principal cause of death was the action of the ex- ternal air in drying and exhausting the body, which he thought might be prevented bv ni- tre ; but, although this great man took three grains of his favourite salt every mornin^ for the last thirty years of his life, he died at the age of sixty-six. ° t The soothsayers attributed many mystic properties to the coral, and it was believed to be capable of giving protection against the influence of " mil eyes,-" it was even supposed that coral would drive away devils and evil spirits, overcome sorrow, and drive awav troub lesome dreams: hence arose the custom of wearing amulets composed of it around the neck, and of making crowns of it. Pliny and Dioscorides are very loud in their nraises of the medicinal properties of this substance, and Paracelsus says that it should be worn around the necks of infants as an admirable preservative against fits, sorcery charms and even against poison. The bells which are commonly suspended to it were'originall'v in tended to frighten away evil spirits, and not to amuse the child by their iinf diluted spirits of wine; one drop of which solution is again shaken together with ninety-nine drops of the vinous spirit; and another repe- tition of this process having reduced the mixture to the billionth degree, a few sugar pellets, of the size of poppy seeds, are moistened with this liquid, whereof two or three constitute a dose! But the deglutition of even these minute particles is not esteemed always needful; in some instances it is only necessary to smell the vial in which the pellets are enclosed.* Now the reader will be curious to hear what the * The reader will be able to judge of the efficacy of the homoeopathic preparations from the following calculations, which are mathematically correct. It will be recollected that but one grain of medicine is employed for all the dilutions, however inert the substance may be, as sulphur, charcoal, sponge, lime, &c, and the higher dilutions are considered more powerful than the lower. Dilutions. Cubic feet of Water, weight 62.5 lbs. to the foot. (Decimals rejected ) 5 22 587 10 228,571,428,571,428 15 2,285,714.285,714,285,714,285,714 20 22,857,142,857,142,857,142,857,142,857,142,857 25 228,571,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571 428 30 2,285,714,285,714,285,714,285,714,285,714,285,714,285,714,285,714,285,714. Cubic feet of Sugar. Spec, gravity 1.6. (Decimals rejected ) 5 14,285 10 142,857,142,857,142 15 1,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571 20 14,285,714,285,714,285,714,285,714,285,714,285 25 142,857,142,857,142,857,142,857,142,857,142,857,142,857,142 30 1,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571,428,571. Diameter in feet and miles of a sphere of Sugar whose solid contents are equal to the auantitu in the preceding calculation. (Decimals rejected.) <*««'""* Feet. Miles. 5 30 10 64,859 12 15 139,733,576 26,464 20 301,046,863,889 57,016,451 25 30 1,397,335,762,135,022,914 264,646,924 646 784 H0M030PATHY. 33 homoeopathist can possibly adduce in support of so strange a vagary of the imagination, he shall therefore, in a few words, be informed of the process of reasoning by which the value of infinitesimal doses is sought to be' established. " Since, in the treatment of disease, medicines cal- culated to produce similar effects are alone to be used, these medicines will have to work upon an organization already predisposed to be affect- ed.by them; and the power of medicine being at any rate more ener- getic than that of natural sickness, a very small quantity of medicine must be adequate to act upon an organization thus prepared. The slightest aggravation of the disease by medical means will constitute an artificial malady powerful enough to control and suppress the natural one; and the more slight this artificial malady, the more easily will it, in its turn, give way to the vital principle." In the next place, Hah- nemann contends that the rubbing and shaking to which the preparations are subjected, not only alter, but develop, in a manner hitherto unknown, the powers of the drugs so treated: so that it is upon the augmented force of the medicines, however reduced in bulk, which results from his method of preparing them, that the founder of this strange system seems inclined to rest his explanation. That among the credulous public a train of knight-errants should be found to enter the lists against science and common sense is not so ex- traordinary ; but that any professional man of ordinary education and honesty should present himself as the defender of a doctrine that con- tradicts all facts, and confounds all opinions, is wholly unaccountable. " But cures have been performed through its means;" true—but on Dilutions. Cubic miles of Water. (Decimals rejected.) 5 10 1,552 15 15,528,166,354,612 20 155,281,663,546,126,356,043,711 25 155,281,663,546,126,356,043,711,416,427,470,7 oO 155,281,663,546,126,356,043,711,416,427,470,792,147,007,20 A few illustrations, by way of comparison, may not be amiss. Longest diameter of the orbit of the comet of Do. of Halley's comet .... Distance of the nearest fixed star Greatest distance of Earth from the Sun do. Mercury do. do. Venus do. do. Moon do. do. Mars do. do. Jupiter do. do. Saturn do. do. Herschel do. Miles. 680 13,000,000,000 3,420,000,000,000 20,140,000,000,000 97,118,538 132,487,077 164,602,034 254,084 241,047,462 592,279,083 1,006,655,236 1,918,089,022 Thus it appears that the 20th dilution would require a sphere oi sugar more than half the diameter nf the sun's distance from the earth, and a sphere oi water about equal in diameter to the same distance; while the 30th would require a sphere oi sugar, in comparison of the diameter of which, the distance of Herschel from the earth would form but an infinitely small fraction! Hahnemann, however, recommends that the dilutions be carried in certain cases as high as the 1500th, and remarks, " Experience has proved that it is impossible to at- tenuate the dose of a perfectly homoeopathic remedy to such a degree that it will not produce a de- cided amelioration in the disease."—(Stratten's Tran. of Organon, p. 274.) Again, all the fresh- water lakes in North America, including the great, lakes at the North, are estimated to con- tain fourteen thousand cubic miles of water; but the eleventh dilution would require more than ten times this quantity of fluid. A grain of antimony dropped into Lake Superior would therefore suffice for centuries to medicate its waters, so that a teaspoonful, taken at the Falls of Niagara, would constitute a much stronger dose than the homoeopaths usually ad- minister. It is demonstrable that a single rose, growing on the surface of our earth, or even the planet Herschel, would be more likely to affect each inhabitant on our globe by its aroma, more powerfully than any homoeopathic medicine whatever at the 20th dilution !— Am. Ed. E 34 CONCLUDING REMARKS whom ? On hypochondriacs who have been drenched for years with physic, and to whom this system has brought a truce, while it nas en- couraged their faith through the medium of the imagination. If it were necessary to enter upon a serious refutation ot tnis doc- trine, we might, in the first place, observe, that symptoms, apparently similar, arise from the most opposite conditions of disease ; witness, lor instance, those connected with disturbance of the digestive and cerebral organs. Then, with regard to the facts upon which this doctrine is founded; who ever heard of quina producing ague, or colchiciim the gout i All experience disproves these data; some of the members of the Academie de Medecine have fairly put them to the test. Andral tried the system on one hundred and thirty patients, in the presence of the homoeopathists themselves, adopting every care and precaution, yet in not one instance was he successful; in short, by what stretch of inge- nuity or compass of belief can any rational person be brought to the con- viction that a portion of matter so infinitely small can ever affect the hu- man frame ; or, supposing that possible, how can we admit that the remedies proposed are appropriate to the diseases ?* " Malum quod minimum est, id minimum est malum." In the foregoing sketch my object has not been to furnish anything like a connected history, but to point out such prominent doctrines as may have retarded or accelerated our knowledge of medicinal substan- ces. To us, enlightened as we are in the present day by the highly-ad- vanced state of the various collateral branches of science, we cannot but feel surprised that hypotheses, so extraordinary and apparently ab- surd, should connect themselves with names which we have been taught to revere as the luminaries of physic ; but though history may thus throw into prominent relief the errors of the past, it will no less point out examples of wisdom, and enable us to draw lessons of instruction from its stores ; we shall find, for instance, that the wisest of those phy- sicians, however they may have indulged in extravagant hypotheses, never allowed their speculations to vitiate their practice, or to divert them from the steady path of experience. The former must be attribu- ted to the darkness of the age, the latter to the sound understanding and * Dr. Millingen, who has been claimed as a believer in homoeopathy, observes, " To sup- port his doctrines, Hahnemann should have proved, 1st, that medicinal powers do pro- duce an artificial malady similar to the natural affection; 2d, that the organism only re- mains under the influence of the medicinal disease; 3d, that this medicinal disease is of short duration; and, 4th, that all these effects can only be produced by a medicine selected according to the similarity of symptoms. Our theorist has utterly failed in his endeavours to establish these facts."—Curiosities of Literature, p. 236. He has also stated that Hahnemann was notoriously unsuccessful in his practice, "al- though he had pronounced his own doctrines infallible, and founded on immutable laws; so that, in 1828, he announced that he had discovered the hidden source of the obstacles he encountered ; and that, after many years of experiments and meditation, he had come to the conclusion that almost all chronic diseases originated from constitutional miasmatic affections or predispositions, which he divides into sycosis, syphilis, and psora, or, in plain English, the itch!" We may add, that Hahnemann himself violates his own principle of " similia" on almost every page of his writings; for, besides recommending antidotes to several poisons, alkalies against mineral acids, liver of sulphur against metallic poisons, coffee, camphor, and ipecacuanha against poisoning by opium, &c, he remarks, " In ur- gent and dangerous cases, or in diseases that have just broken out in persons who were- previously in health, such as asphyxia by lightning, suffocation, freezing, drowning, &c, it is proper, in the first instance at least, to reanimate the feeling and instability by the aid of palliatives, such as slight electric shocks, injections of strong coffee, stimulating odours, warmth " &c, thus acting contrarily to the morbid state by stimulants, and in the most direct manner, producing an opposite state, according to the rule " contraria."—Am. £rf ON THE INFLUENCE OF THEORY. 35 penetration of the individual. Hippocrates never suffered his theoiy of the humours to supersede his vigilant observation of facts. Aretseus was a disciple of the Pneumatics (a branch from the Methodics), but the medical scholar knows full well how to appreciate his unrivalled descriptions of disease. Baglivi was a zealous partisan of the Iatro-mathematical school, but in practice he was a faithful follower of Hippocrates. Sydenham was a believer in the morbid fermentation of the fluids, but he kept his theo- ry in subjection to his experience, and was one of the wisest of practi- cal physicians. Boerhaave was attached to the mechanical doctrine of Bellini, but who ever read his Institutions and his Aphorisms, who did not recognise in him the correct observer and sagacious practitioner? Theory can no more mislead such practitioners than the Will o' the wisp can seduce the traveller who carries a lighted torch. Thus, then, the importance attached to the distinction between the dogmatist and empiric has no substantial foundation. It has been well observed, that " the boldest dogmatist professes to build his theory upon facts, and the strictest empiric cannot combine his facts without some aid from theory." Far otherwise, however, is it where, without the light of ex- perience, or the talent for observation, the student deeply imbued with the speculations of the schools, enters upon the practice of physic ; hence, in the hands of those whose theories have not been under the subjection of experience, have many of our more valuable remedies fallen into disrepute ; the fame even of Peruvian bark has been occa- sionally obscured by the clouds of false theory ; some have condemned its use altogether, "because it did not evacuate the morbific matter:" others, again, " because it only bound up the spirits, and stopped the paroxysms for a time, and favoured the translation of the peccant matter into the more noble parts;" thus, we learn from Morton,* that Oliver Cromwell fell a victim to an intermittent fever, because the physicians were too timid to make a trial of the bark. In the history of this medi- cine, it is a curious fact that it was first sold by the Jesuits for its weight of silver,f and that, according to Condamine, in 1690, about thirty years afterward, several thousand pounds of it lay at Piura and Payta for want of a purchaser. Nor has sugar escaped the influence of hypothesis. Dr. Willisf raised a popular outcry against its domestic use, declaring that " it contained within its particles a secret acid ; a dangerous sharp- ness, which caused scurvies, consumptions, and other dreadful diseases." Some chemical physicians regarded it as favourable to nutrition, since, in consequence of the property which it possesses of uniting oily and watery bodies, they thought it would enable the unctuous part of the food to unite with the animal juices ; while others, on the contrary, deduced a very different inference, and supposed that, from this same property, sugar would prevent the separation of the oily part of the food, and thus * Pyrktologia, p. 17, A.D. 1692. t Sturmius, in his " Febrifugi Peruviani Vindicias," published in 1658, observes that he saw twenty doses of the powder sold at Brussels for sixty florins, in order that it might be sent to Paris, and that he would willingly have become a purchaser of some doses even at that price, but the apothecary was unable to supply him; an anecddte not more illustrative of the reputation of the bark than of the honesty of the vender. This species of exchange, with regard to popular drugs, was not uncommon. According to Aubrey, tobacco was sold for its weight in silver, and " I have heard some of our old yeomen," he observes, " say, that when they went to a Malmesbury or Chippenham market, they called out the biggest shillings that lay in the scale against the tobacco;" and Hamel says that, in the Korea, opium is bartered for in a similar manner. X Dr. Willis first discovered the existence of sugar in diabetic urine. 36 THE APPLICATION OF CHEMICAL SCIENCE. counteract the process of nutrition. Had the voice of experience been heard, these theorists would soon have discovered that sugar is incapa- ble of producing either the one or the other of these effects. With regard to the more immediate object of the present work, 1 would advise the pharmacologist, in recording his experience, never to mix up speculations with the statement of observed facts. VV ithout any intention to falsify his record, the practitioner too frequently distorts truth, unperceived even by himself, from the use of language which par- takes of the colouring of false theory. It is this which has rendered the experience of many of our older writers on the nature of the Mate- ria Medica worse than useless, and has converted what might otherwise have been a rich store of practical wisdom into a mass of error and con- fusion. . In concluding our analysis of the revolutions of medical theories, with a view to convert their errors into lessons of instruction, there is a mor- al to be deduced from the history of their adoption and promulgation, too valuable to be left without a passing remark. In philosophy, as in politics, the partisans of a popular leader have ever been more sanguine and less reasonable than their master; they not only delude the world, but they appear anxious to deceive themselves ; and while they warmly defend "their favourite system from the attacks of those that may assail it, they willingly close their own eyes, and conceal from themselves the different points that may be weak and untenable; or, to borrow the figurative language of a French writer, they are like the pious children of Noah, who went backward, that they might not see the nakedness which they approached to cover. If the departed spirits of the founders of political, religious, or philosophical sects, could by some necromantic power be recalled to justify their opinions, there would not be one of them that would not declare his disciples had far outstripped the bound- aries of his creed.* THE APPLICATION AND MISAPPLICATION OF CHEMICAL SCIENCE. Among the researches of different authors who, animated with a sacred zeal for ancient learning, have endeavoured to establish the antiquity of chemical science, we find many conclusions deduced from an ingenious interpretation of the mythological fablesf which are supposed to have been transmitted by the Egyptians, who, pre- vious to the invention of letters, adopted this method of perpetua- ting their discoveries in natural philosophy. Thus, wherever Ho- mer studiously describes the stolen embraces of Mars and Venus, they recognise some chemical secret, some combination of iron with copper, shadowed in the glowing ornaments of fiction. Lord * When John Wilkes was rallied by the king for his apparent indifference to the cause ot liberty, he assured his majesty that he never had been a Wilkite. t We must admit that some of these allegories are too obvious to be mistaken. Homer attributes the plague that prevailed in the Grecian camp to the darts of Apollo; what was meant by this, but that it arose from the action of a burning sun upon the marshes and sli- my shores of Troas? and what, again, can be more obvious than the allegory by which bcho is made the daughter of air and earth ? CHEMICAL SCIENCE KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 37 Bacon* conceived that the union of spirit and matter was allegori- zed in the fable of Proserpine being seized by Pluto as she was gathering flowers : an allusion, says Dr. Darwin, which is rendered more curiously exact by the late discovery that pure air (oxygen) is given out by vegetables, and that in this state it is greedily ab- sorbed by inflammable bodies. The same ingenious poet supposes that the fable of Jupiter and Juno, by whose union the vernal show- ers were said to be produced, was meant to portray the production of water by the combination of its two elements; "an opinion which," says he, " is strongly supported by the fact that, in the an- cient mythology, the purer air, or cether, was always represented by Jupiter, and the inferior by Juno." Were the elegant author of the Botanic Garden now living, he would no doubt, with a taste and delicacy peculiarly his own, avail himself of the singular discovery of Mr. Smithson,f who has detected in the juice of the mulberry two distinct species of colouring matter; the mingled blood of the unfortunate Pyramus and Thisbe : " Signa tene caedis; pullosque et luctibus aptos Semper habe faetus, gemina monumenta cruoris." Ovid, Metamorph., lib. iv., 160. Sir William Drummond, the learned apologist of Egyptian sci- ence, conceives that the laws of latent heat were even known to the philosophers of that ancient nation, and that caloric in such a state was symbolically represented by Vulcan, while free or sensible caloric was as clearly described in the character of Vesta. Those who maintain the antiquity of chemistry, and suppose that the fabulous conceptions of the ancients were but a mysterious veil ingeniously thrown by philosophy between nature and the lower order of peo- ple, consider that the alchemical secret is metaphorically conceal- ed in the fable of the Golden Fleece of the Argonauts, and reject the more probable solution of this story by Strabo, who says, that the Iberians, near neighbours of the Colchians, used to receive the gold, brought down from the highlands by the torrents, into sieves and sheepskins, and that from thence arose the fable of the golden fleece. Dionysius of Mitylene offers a different explanation of the fable, and supposes it to allude to a book written on skins, and con- taining an account of the process of making gold according to the art of alchemy. Notwithstanding the confidence with which modern philosophers have claimed the discovery, the experimental mode of investiga- tion was undoubtedly known and pursued by the ancients, who ap- pear, says Mr. Leslie,J to have concealed their notions respecting it under the veil of allegory. Proteus signified the mutable and chan- ging forms of material objects, and the inquisitive philosopher was counselled by the poets§ to watch their slippery demon when slum- bering on the shore, to bind him, and compel the reluctant captive to reveal his secrets. This, adds Mr. Leslie, gives a lively picture of the cautious but intrepid advances of the skilful experimenter; he * Bacon's Works, vol. v., p. 470, 4th edit., London, 1778. (• This gentleman was an early friend of Dr. Wollaston, and, like that distinguished phi- losopher, he delighted in microscopic analysis. Upon one occasion he caught the tear of a lady as it was trickling down her cheek, and having submitted it to experiment, ascertained the presence of several saline bodies. X Leslie's Elements of Natural Philosophy. $ Virg., Georg., iv., 392^02. 38 THE SCIENCES PRESERVED BY THE ARABS. tries to press nature into a corner—he endeavours to separate the different principles of action—he seeks to concentrate the predom- inant agent, and labours to exclude, as much as possible, every disturbing influence.* . . f , But with whatever ingenuity and success the antiquity ot chem- ical knowledge may be advocated as it relates to the various arts of life, yet it must be allowed that not the most remote trace of its application to physic can be discovered in the medical writers of Greece or Rome. The operation of distillationf is not even men- tioned by Hippocrates or Galen ; and the waters of different plants, as described by some later authors, are to be understood, as we are informed by Gesner, merely as simple decoctions, and not as the products of any chemical process; while the essences of Dioscon- des, Galen, Oribasius, and others, were only the extracts produced by the evaporation of such infusions. Upon the downfall of the Roman Empire, all the sciences, the arts, and literature, were overwhelmed in the general wreck, and the early Mohammedans, in the first paroxysms of their fanaticism, endeavoured to destroy every record of the former progress of the human mind ; consigning to destruction, by the conflagration of the Alexandrian library, no less than seven hundred thousand volumes, which comprised the most valuable works of science and litera- ture.:]: It is not a little extraordinary that this same people were destined, at a more advanced period, to rekindle the light of let- ters^ which they had taken such pains to extinguish, and to be- come the inventors and cultivators of a new science, boundless in its views, and inexhaustible in its applications. The medical pro- fession, too, was more particularly selected as an object of reward and encouragement ; and we may say, with much truth, that our Materia Medica is more indebted to the zeal and industry of the Arabians than to the learning of the Greeks, or to the refinement of the Romans. From this source we have acquired the milder purges of manna, cassia, senna, rhubarb, and many plants and Ori- ental aromatics, among which we may notice musk, nutmeg, mace, and cloves, the introduction of which into medicine was greatly facili- tated by the situation of Bagdad, and its connexion with India ; and although Archigenes and Aretaius had long before applied blisters, yet it is to the Arabian physicians that we are indebted for a prac- tical acquaintance with their value, for, in general, the Greeks and Romans prescribed acrid sinapisms for such a purpose. We are also indebted to the Arabians for our knowledge respecting cam- phor, as its name imports, for the original word was Cafur, or Can- fur.\\ They are also the first upon record who speak of sugar and * Mr. Sankey also conceives, with much ingenuity, that this fable of Proteus expresses, allegorically, the difficulty of seizing upon elementary forms, as well as the infinity of com- binations of which they are susceptible, ripwrtioj, he observes, being derived from Trpuroj, signified the first principle or element. t Dioscorides and Pliny describe a process which may be considered that of distillation in its infancy; it consists in obtaining oil from pitch, by spreading over it, while boiling, fleeces of wool, which receive the vapour, and afterward yield it by expression In this country the art of distillation was unknown at the time when the Romans had possession of it. It is said to have been introduced in the early part of Henry II. X It was destroyed in the sixth century by the Caliph Omar, the contemporary and companion of Mohammed. ' § The Saracens, in their treaty with the Greek emperors, demanded, by express articles the works of the ancients. ' II Garcias, as well as Geoffroy and Hill, say that Aetius mentions camphor, but it cannot ORIGIN OF ALCHEMY 39 sugar-candy, extracted from the sugar-cane, which they call honey of cane ; and they ushered into practice sirups, juleps, and conserves. At the same time, it is but just to allow that, from the disgusting ostentation of this people, and their strong attachment to the mar- vellous, many absurd medicines have been introduced. Gold, sil- ver, bezoars, and precious stones were received into the Materia Medica, and surprising virtues were attributed to them. Among a people thus disposed to magnificence, and from the very spirit of their religion credulous and romantic, it is not a matter of surprise that their first researches into the nature of bodies should have rais- ed a hope, and excited a belief, that the baser metals might be con- verted into gold. They conceived that gold was the metallic element in a state of perfect purity, and that all the other metals differed from it in pro- portion only to the extent of their individual contamination; and hence the origin of the epithet base, as applied to such metals. This hypothesis explains the origin of alchemy; but in every his- tory we are informed that the earlier alchemists expected, by the same means that they hoped to convert the baser metals into gold, to produce a universal remedy, calculated to prolong indefinitely the span of human existence. It is difficult to imagine what connexion could exist in their ideas between the " Philosopher's Sto?ie," which was to transmute metals, and a remedy which could arrest the progress of bodily infirmity: upon searching, however, into the writings of these times, it ap- pears probable that this conceit may have originated with the al- chemists from the application of false analogies, and that the error was subsequently diffused and exaggerated by a misconstruction of alchemical metaphors.* An example of reasoning by false analogy is presented to us by Paracelsus, in his work De Vita Longd, wherein, speaking of antimo- ny he exclaims, " Sicut antimonium finit aurum, sic, eddem ratione et formal, corpus humanum purum reddit." The processes of alchemy were always veiled in the mostenigmatic and obscure language ; the earliest alchemist whose name has reach- ed posterity is Geber, an Arabian prince of the seventh century, whose lano-uao-e was so proverbially obscure, that Dr. Johnson suppo- ses the word gibberish, ox geber is h, to have been derived from this circumstance ; sometimes the processes of alchemy were expressed by a figurative and metaphorical style of description ; thus Geber exclaims, " Bring me the six lepers, that I may cleanse them ;" by which he implied the conversion of the six metals,f the only ones then known, into gold. From the works of later alchemists, it also be found, as Dr. Alston has observed, in that or in any other Greek author. There is a campharw herba in Mvrepsus ; but this is evidently a very different thing. * The records of physic, if I am not deceived, will afford numerous instances of similar error, from mistaking figurative expressions for literal truths. A knowledge of this species of fallacy will explain the origin of several very extraordinary receipts. [ shall select the following instance by way of illustration. " In many of the ancient works on physic, we find the blood of the goat extolled for its efficacy in dissolving stones, and, from this sup- posed lithontriptic virtue, it forms the principal ingredient of the powder of Nicolaus, and of the Electuary of the Queen of Colein. The expression which gave origin to this belief was evidently allegorical, signifying that the blood of the goat, by which our Saviour was typified, was capable of softening the stony hearts of his enemies, or, accord- in" to others, that, by his influence, the stony rocks and vail of the temple were shattered." —Bruune's Vulgar Errors. t Silver, mercury, copper, iron, tin, lead. 40 RHASES.--AVICENNA.--ROGER BACON. appears that they constantly represented goldas a sound, healthy, and durable man, the imperfect metals as diseased men, and the means or processes by which-the latter were to be transmuted into the for- mer, they designated by the name of medicines; and hence, those who were anxious to dive into the secrets of these magicians,, or SHUCJJtS, as they termed themselves, without possessing a key to the language, supposed that these descriptions were to be under- stood in a literal sense, and that the imperfect metals might be changed into gold, and the bodies of sick persons into healthy ones, by one and the same chemical preparation. The hieroglyphical style of writing adopted by the earlier al- chemists was in a great degree supported by the prevailing idea that the elements were under the dominion of spiritual beings, who might be submitted to human power; and Sir Humphrey Davy has observed that the notions of fairies, and of genii, which have been depicted with so much vividness of fancy and liveliness of descrip- tion in The Thousand and One Nights, seem to have been connect- ed with the pursuit of the science of transmutation, and the pro- duction of the elixir of life. That the Arabian Nights' Entertain- ment admits of a mystic interpretation, is an opinion which 1 have long entertained. How strikingly is the effect of fermented spirit, in banishing the pressure of the melancholy which occurs in soli- tude, depicted in the story of Sinbad, when he encountered the withered and decrepit hag on the uninhabited island ! But to re- turn from this digression to the subject of medical chemistry. It was not, in fact, until several years had elapsed in the delusive researches of alchemy, that the application of chemical knowledge became instrumental in the advancement of the medical art. Rha- ses and Avicenna, who were the celebrated physicians of the age, are the first who introduced pharmaceutical preparations into their works, or made any improvement in the mode of conducting phar- maceutical processes. Avicenna describes, particularly, the meth- od of conducting distillation ; he mentions also, for the first time, the three mineral acids, and distinguishes between the vegetable and mineral alkalies; he speaks likewise of the distilled water of roses, of sublimed arsenic, and of corrosive sublimate. In the year 1226, Roger Bacon, a native of Ilchester in Somer- setshire, and a Franciscan monk of Westminster Abbey, laid the foundations of chemical science in Europe; his discoveries were so extraordinary that he was excommunicated by the pope, Nico- las, and imprisoned ten years for supposed dealings with the devil; it appears that he was a believer in a universal elixir, for he pro- posed one to Pope Clement the Tenth, which he extolled highly, as the invention of Petro de Maharncourt, a Picard.* * " For the preparation of this elixir," says the inventor, " you must take that which is temperate in the fourth degree; that which swims in the sea ; that which vegetates in the air; that which is cast out by the sea; that which is found in the bowels of a lon^-lived animal; a plant of India; and two creeping things which are the food of Tyrians and Egyptians, and let them all be properly prepared. This riddle Bacon explains in the fol- lowing manner: ' That which is temperate in the fourth degree is gold, chemically pre- pared ; what swims in the sea is pearl; the flower of rosemary grows by virtue of the air • V^rmaeet,.is thrown out by the sea; the bone found in a stag's heart is taken out of the DOWe S nf a Inner. Ivor! onlmol. .!,„ I__l:__ _1___. :_ i- ... i ., ...'"' corruption of any many BASIL VALENTINE. 41 This wonderful man was succeeded, at the end of the same cen- tury, by Arnoldus de Villa Nova, a Frenchman, or, as others as- sert, a Spaniard, who deserves to be noticed on this occasion, as being the first to recommend the distilled spirit of wine, impreg- nated with certain herbs, as a valuable remedy, from which we may date the introduction of tinctures into medical practice; for although Thaddeus, a Florentine, who died in 1270, at the age of eighty, bestowed great commendation upon the virtues of spirit of wine, yet he never used it as a solvent for active vegetable matter. It was not, however, until the end of the thirteenth century that chemistry can be said to have added any considerable power to the arm of physic. Basil Valentine, a German Benedictine monk, led the way to the internal administration of metallic medicine, by a variety of experiments on the nature oi antimony, and in his " Currus Trium- phulis Jlntimonii," a work written in high Dutch, he has described a number of the combinations of that metal. If, however, we may credit a vague tradition, he was extremely unfortunate in his first experiments upon his brother monks, all of whom he injured, if not killed. Those who have keen ears for etymological sounds will instantly recognise, in this circumstance, the origin of the word antimony—avri Mova^ovc;. It appears that the ancients were ignorant of the internal use and administration of the metals, with the exception of iron, al- though they frequently used them in external applications Hip- pocrates recommends lead in several parts of his works, as an epu- lotic application, and for other external purposes. Litharge of gold and cerusse also entered the composition of several powders ex- tolled by that ancient physician as possessing great efficacy in de- fluxions of the eyes. Oribasius and Aetius added a " lithargyrium" to several plasters, and the composition of the " snow-like plaster" from minium, was long preserved among their most valuable se- crets. Whether antimony is the stimmi or stibium of the ancients has been a matter of conjecture : for Pliny, in speaking of its prep- aration, observes, " Ante omnia urendi modus necessarius, ne plum- bum fiat." This plumbum, however, was evidently the revived metal of antimony, with which the ancients were unacquainted, and, therefore, mistook it for lead; besides, the word plumbum, like many others which I have before mentioned, was used as a gener- al term ;* thus, according to Pliny, tin was called plumbum album ; and Agricola calls lead plumbum nigrum f The question, however, is unimportant, for this stibium was nev- er used but as an external astringent, especially for the purpose of contracting the eyelids, and thereby of making the eyes appear very large, which has been considered, from the most remote an- tiquity, as a feature of great beauty ; thus the epithet /3ouJ7UC is con- stantly applied by Homer to Juno. This practice appears also to have been followed by the Jews, for Jezebel is said to have paint- ed her eyebrows to make her eyes appear big ;% the expression years." But, alas! in spite of this antidote, his friend, Pope Clement, died soon after, and left him to the mercy of his old enemy. Pope Nicolas. * The term, as applied to money, has been supposed by Pinkerton and others to signify a coin of no value ; to be, in fact, a mere expression of contempt. t Agricola de vetenbus et novis metallis, lib. i. $ 2 Kings, chap, ix., verse 30. 42 PARACELSUS. also shows that the drug employed was the stimmi. EoriuuioaTO rove o&daXuovc avrvc. , ,. To Basil Valentine we are moreover indebted for the discov- ery of the volatile alkali, and of its preparation from sal ammoniac; he also first used mineral acids as solvents, and noticed the pro- duction oi ether from alcohol; he seems also to have understood the virtues of sulphate of iron, for he says, when internally admin- istered, it is tonic and comforting to a weak stomach, and that, ex- ternally applied, it is astringent and styptic : he moreover recom- mended a fixed alkali, made from vine twigs cut in the beginning of March, for the cure of gout and gravel. In the year U93 was born, near Zurich, in Switzerland, Para- celsus, or, as he termed himself, Philippus-Theophrastus-Bombas- tus Paracelsus de Hohenheim, a man who was destined to produce a greater revolution in the Materia Medica, and a greater change in medical opinions and practice, than any person who had appear- ed since the days of Galen. He travelled all over the Continent of Europe to obtain knowledge in chemistry and physic, and was a great admirer of Basil Valentine, declaring that antimony was not to be equalled, for medicinal virtue, by any other substance in nature; this opinion, however, does not deserve our respect, for it was not founded upon observation and experiment, but on a fanciful anal- ogy, derived from a property which this metal possesses of refining gold, as 1 have before related. He also used mercury without re- serve, and appears to have been the first who ventured to adminis- ter it internally ;* for although Avicenna asserts that it was not so poisonous as the ancients had imagined, yet he does not attribute to it any virtues; he merely says, "Argentum quidem vivum, plu- rimi qui bibunt, non Iceduatur eo." Its effects, when applied exter- nally, were well known to Theodoric the Friar, afterward Bishop of Cervia, in the twelfth century, who describes the salivation which mercurial frictions will produce. Paracelsus, moreover, employed lead internally in fevers: '■•Salurnus purgat febres" was one of his most favourite maxims. He also gives us directions for the preparation of red precipitate with mercury and aquafortis. Uninfluenced by the prevailing prejudice of the time, that opium was cold in the fourth degree, he administered this narcotic, the use of which he had learned from the Turks, with a liberal hand ; a practice which gave him a great advantage over his contemporaries. Paracelsus, thus armed with opium, mercury, and antimony, rem- edies of no trifling importance, travelled in all directions, and per- formed many extraordinary cures, among which wa.s that of the famous printer Frobenius of Basil, a circumstance which immedi- ately brought him acquainted with Erasmus,| and made him known to the magistracy of Basil, who elected him professor of chemistry in the year 1527, which was the first professorship that was estab- * It has been already stated that we are indebted to an Indian for the discovery of bark, and it now appears we derived our knowledge of mercury from the wildest of the alche- mists. May it not, then, be said that we are indebted to a savage and a madman for two of our most powerful remedies ? t Erasmus, the friend, the correspondent, and the patient of our own Linacre ! " Had not modern times," says Sir George Baker," furnished similar instances, it would have been a matter of astonishment to us to have heard that Erasmus should have deserted an accomplished physician, whom he so greatly extols in his epistles, in order to consult so wild and illiterate an enthusiast as Paracelsus." CAREER OF PARACELSUS. 43 lished in Europe for the promotion and dissemination of chemical science. But notwithstanding this testimony of his success, if we may credit Libavius, he often, like our modern quacks, left his pa- tients more diseased than he found them ; and it is ackowledged by his own disciple, Oporinus, that when he was sent for to any town, for the purpose of administering his remedies, he was rare- ly suffered to protract his visit, on account of the general resent- ment of the inhabitants. While seated in his chair, he burned with great solemnity the writings of Galen and Avicenna, and declared to his audience that, if God would not impart the secrets of physic, it was not only al- lowable, but even justifiable, to consult the devil. His contempo- rary physicians he treated with the most sottish vanity and illiber- al insolence. In the preface to his work entitled " Paragranum," he tells them " that the very down of his bald pate had more knowledge than all their writers, the buckles of his shoes more learning than Galen and Avicenna, and his beard more experience than all their universities." With such a temper, it could not be supposed that he would long retain his chair ; in fact, he quitted it in consequence of a quarrel with the magistrates, after which he continued to ramble about the country, generally intoxicated, and seldom changing his clothes or even going to bed ; and al- though he boasted of possessing a panacea which was capable of curing all diseases in an instant, and even of prolonging life to an indefinite length, yet this drunkard and prince of empirics died, after a few hours' illness, in the forty-eighth year of his age, at Salzburg in Bavaria, with a bottle of his immortal catholicon in his pocket.* In contemplating the career of this extraordinary man, it is diffi- cult to say whether disgust or astonishment is the most predomi- nant feeling ; his insolence and unparalleled conceit, his insinceri- ty and brutal singularities, and his habits of immorality and de- bauchery, are beyond all censure ; while the important services he has rendered mankind, by opposing the bigotry of the schools, and introducing powerful remedies into practice, cannot be re- corded without feelings of gratitude and respect; but in whatever estimation Paracelsus may be held, there can be no doubt but that his fame produced a very considerable influence on the character of the age, by exciting the envy of some, the emulation of others, and the industry of all.fj * The monument of this extraordinary person is still to be seen in the Church of St. Sebastian, in Salzburg. " It is very simple, and formed of the red-brown marble of the country. It bears his head in relief, and an inscription, which is a proof of the great esteem in which his memory was held even till the middle of the eighteenth century."—Tobin's Journal of a Tour. t Paracelsus maintained that the human body is composed of salt, sulphur, and mercu- ry, and that in these " three first substances," as he calls them, health and disease consist; that the meicury,in proportion to its volatility, produces tremours, mortifications in the lig- aments, madness, phrensy, and delirium ; and that fevers, phlegmons, and the jaundice are the offspring of the sulphureous principle, while he supposed that the colic, stone, gravel, gout, and sciatica derive their origin from salt. X A few quotations from the writings of this notorious charlatan will serve to illustrate his character better, perhaps, than any mere description could do. " It matters not," says Paracelsus, " whether it be God or the devil, angels or unclean spirits, cure the patient, so that he be cured. If a man fall into a ditch, what matter is it whether a friend or an ene- my help him out ? And if I be troubled with such a malady, what care I whether the devil himself, or any of his ministers, by God's permission, heal me ? A magician is God's minis- 44 VAN HELMONT.--LA BOE.--TACHENIUS. About a century after Paracelsus, Van Helmont took the lead m physic; he was a man of most indefatigable industry, and spent fifty years in torturing, by every chemical experiment he could de- vise, the various objects in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. To him we are indebted for having first noticed the existence of several permanently elastic fluids, or azrs, whose properties differed from those of common air, and to whicn he gave the name of gases. He was the first physician who applied alum in uterine haemorrhage, and he acquired a great reputation from the success of the practice. Although Paracelsus* had pub- lished some wild notions on the subject of calculi, Van Helmont, in his treatise " De Lithiasi" was the first who attempted to inves- tigate the subject by experiment; and he certainly obtained some important results, viz., that urinary calculi were quite different from the stony bodies of the mineral kingdom. Sylvius de la Boe and Otho Tachenius followed in the track of Van Helmont. A feeling in favour of chemical remedies having been thus intro- duced, the merited success which attended their operation, and the zeal and perseverance which distinguished the votaries of that science, soon kindled a more general enthusiasm in its favour. It is impossible to reduce into miniature the historical features of these chemical times, so as to bring them within any reasonable compass; I must therefore rest satisfied with delineating a few of the more prominent outlines. The Galenists, who were in posses- sion of the schools, and whose reasonings were fettered by the strongest predilection for their own doctrines, instantly took the alarm ; and the celebrated contest ensued between the Galenical and Chemical sects, which has given such a controversial tone to the writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As this revolt from orthodox authority was in a great degree attributed to the mischievous introduction and unmerited success of antimonial rem- edies, so were the preparations of this metal denounced with all the virulence of party spirit;! ar>d upon this occasion, In order to ter and vicar, and if the sick have good faith and a strong imagination, they shall find the effects, let divines say to the contrary what they will. Many diseases cannot otherwise be cured; if they be caused by incantation, they must be cured by incantation."—(De Occult. Philos., lib. 1.) Burton, speaking of this boastful quack, remarks, " Paracelsus and his chemistical fol- lowers, as so many Promethei, will fetch tire from heaven, will cure all manner of diseases with minerals, accounting them the only physic. Paracelsus calls Galen, Hippocrates, and all their adherents, infants, idiots, sophisters &c. Apagesis istos qui Vulcanias istas met- amorphoses sugillant, in scitias soboles, supinae pertinacias alumnos, &c, not worthy the name of physicians, for want of these remedies; and brags, that by them he can make a man live 160 years, or to the world's end. With their alexipharmicums, panaceas, mummias, un- guentum armarium, and such magnelical cures ; lampas vitse et mortis, balneum Dianas, balsamum, electrum, magico-physicum, amuleta, martiala, &c, what will not he and his followers effect.' He brags, moreover, that he was primus medicorum, and did more famous cures than all the physicians in Europe besides ; a drop of his preparations should go far- ther than a drachm or ounce of theirs, those loathsome and fulsome filthy potions, hetero- chtical pills (so he calls them), horse-medicines, ad quovum aspectum Cyclops Polyphemus, ex- horresceret /"—(An. Mel., vol. ii., p. 100.)—Am. Ed. * Paracelsus conceived that the generation of tartar was the source of these diseases; and he supposed that calculi were produced from the liquids of the body in the same wav that tartar is deposited from wine. t Among the writers engaged in this contest, no one was more animated with party spirit than Guy Patin, who was profuse in his personalities against those who defended me use of antimony ; he drew up a long register of the unsuccessful cases in which this medicine had been employed, which he published under the title of " Antimonial Mab RAPID PROGRESS OF VEGETABLE ANALYSIS. 45 support their ground and oppress and persecute their adversaries, the Galenists actually solicited the assistance of secular power ; the Supreme Council of Paris accordingly proscribed its use by an edict in 1566, and Besnier was expelled the faculty of medicine in 1609, for having administered it to a patient. Such violence serves only to display the extreme ignorance of the age. In this respect, it has been observed, that man may claim his affinity to animals of another class, who are never so fierce as when in the dark. In 1637 antimonial wine was by public authority received into the number of purgatives; and in 1650 a new arret rescinded that of 1566, and again restored antimony to public favour and genera. reputation ; and before we conclude our remarks upon the revolu- tionary history of this extraordinary metal, it deserves to be re- marked, that this very same government, that had with such great virulence, and so little justice, persecuted every practitioner who had shown any predilection for its use, in the year 1720 actually purchased the secret of an antimonial preparation, called Panacea Glauberiana, and which has since been known by the title of Ker- mes Mineral, from a surgeon of the name of La Legerie, who had acquired the secret from the pupil of Glauber. Before this period the invention of calomel-had taken place; this preparation is first mentioned, although very obscurely, by Oswald Crollius, in his Basilica Chemica, in 1608, and in the same year Beguin described it most fully and clearly under the title of Draco Mitigatus, in his Tirocinium Chemicum, which was published in Paris in the same year. Chemistry at this period took possession of the schools,* and while it was gradually grafted into the theory of medicine, it soon became the only guide to its practice, the absurdity of which has been already dwelt upon. In tracing the march of chemical improvement during the last century, we cannot but be struck with the new and powerful rem- edies which it has introduced, and the many unimportant and fee- ble articles which it has dismissed from practice. In the present century the rapid progress of this science has far exceeded the anticipations of its most sanguine votaries ; and even in the difficult department of vegetable analysis, a correctness has been attained, the very attempt at which had been abandoned by the most illustrious chemists of the former age as hopeless and chimerical. How highly interesting is it to compare the results obtained by the academicians of Paris, and published by Geoflroy, in their analyses of several hundred plants by the operation of heat, with the refined and accurate researches in the same branch of science more recently conducted in that country. The former even failed in establishing the least distinction between the most salubrious and the most poisonous plants, while the latter have de- tected, separated, and concentrated the subtile principles upon which their characteristic qualities depend. Opium has thus been compelled to confess its secret source of action ; ipecacuan to yield its emetic element, and Peruvian bark to present its essential prin * In the year 1644, Schroeder published a CAemt'co-medical Pharmacopoeia, which de lineates with accuracy the pharmacy of these times, and enumerates almost all the chemi cal medicines that were known towards the close of this period. 46 IMPORTANT SERVICES OF CHEMISTRY. ciples in a state of the most surprising concentration ; while other powerful vegetables have been so successfully analyzed as to aHord their active constituents in forms of extraordinary activity. Nor have the labours of our contemporaries been confined to tne inves- tigation oi proximate principles ; they have been equally'™™*™ bodies are susceptible, and discovered the laws by which they are governed. . , , . Our pharmacopoeias and dispensatories have cautiously kept pace with the scientific progress of the age; and in tracing them from their oro-in to the present day,* it is gratifying to observe the gradual influence of scientific knowledge in reducing the number of their articles, in simplifying the composition of their formula?, and in improving the processes for their preparation. Chemistry has also been serviceable in establishing the identity of bodies long regarded as specifically different ; thus, an exten- sive list of animal substances has been discarded, since it is known that they owe their properties to one and the same common prin- ciple, as to gelatine, albumen, carbonate of lime, &c. : so, again, every animal substance containing nitrogen is now known to furnish am- monia, and this product is acknowledged to be identical in every case. Such discoveries have necessarily discarded from our Ma- teria Medica numerous articles, as earth-worms, or vipers skinned, and deprived of their entrails, human scull, dried blood, elk's hoof, urine of a child, or that of a healthy young man. &c. In like man- ner, the fixed alkaline salt, produced by the incineration of differ- ent vegetables, has been found to be potass, from whatever plant it may have been obtained, with the exception of marine plants, and, perhaps, some of the Tetradynamia, the former of which yield soda, and the latter ammonia. Previous to the pharmacopoeia of 1745, every vegetable was supposed to yield a salt essentially different, and, therefore, a variety of alkaline preparations were admitted, each bearing the name of the particular plant from which it had been procured, as salt of wormwood, salt of broom, salt of bean-stalks, &c.f * The first Pharmacopoeia was published at Nuremburg, under the sanction of its Sen ate, in the year 1542. For this important act we are indebted to Valerius Cordus, a young student, who, during a transient visit at that place, accidentally produced a collection of medical receipts which he had selected from the works of the most esteemed writers, and with which the physicians of Nuremburg were so highly pleased, that they urged him to print it for the benefit of the apothecaries, and obtained the sanction of the Senate to the undertaking; so casual was the circumstance to which we owe the institution of Pharma- copoeias. The London College were among the last to frame a standard code ; most cities in Europe having anticipated us in the performance of this duty. Our first Pharmacopoeia was not published until the reign of James I., A.D..10)8, exactly a century after the college had received their charter from Henry. Successive editions appeared in the following years, viz., in 1650, 1677, 1721, 1746, 1787, 1809, 1821, 1836. t The revolutionary history of the Materia Medica would seem to require some notice of the abuse and corruption of medical practice by the monks and priests of the Dark Ages. " Actuated," says Hamilton, " by the same mercenary motives that influenced the pagan priests, previously to the reformation effected by Hippocrates, we find the earlier clergy of the Christians pouncing upon the little learning which remained within their grasp, that of medicine more especially, claiming it as their exclusive privilege, and disgracing it by a system of charlatanry and imposture, which would have called a blush into the cheek of even an Asclepiades or a Themison." These superstitious charlatans seem to have de- pended less on actual medicines than on images, shrines, relics, consecrated things, holy water, benedictions, amulets, holy exorcisms, and the sign of the cros's. They found a DEVOTION TO AUTHORITY. 47 The influence which chemistry has exerted upon modern prac- tice, and the reliance which can be placed upon the theories to which it has given origin, will be fully discussed in the Second Part of this work, under the head of " Chemical Remedies." DEVOTION TO AUTHORITY AND ESTABLISHED ROU TINE. This has always been the means of opposing the progress of reason, the advancement of natural truths, and the prosecution of new discover- ies ; while, with effects no less baneful, has it perpetuated many of the errors which have been already enumerated, as well as others not less influential, and which are reserved for future consideration. To give a general currency to a hypothetical opinion, or medicinal reputation to an inert substance, nothing more is required than the talis- manic aid of a few great names ; when once established upon such a basis, ingenuity, argument, and even experiment, may open their inef- fectual batteries ; the laconic sentiment of the Roman satirist is ever opposed to remonstrance : " Marcus dixit ? ita est." A physician can- not err in the opinion of the public, if he implicitly obeys the dogmas of authority. In the most barbarous ages of ancient Egypt, he was pun- ished or rewarded according to the extent of his success : but to escape the former it was only necessary to show that an orthodox plan of cure had been followed, such as was prescribed in the acknowledged writings of Hermes. It is an instinct in our nature to follow the track pointed out by a few leaders ; we are gregarious animals, in a moral as well as a physical sense, and we are addicted to routine because it is always easier to follow the opinions of others than to reason and judge for our- selves ; and thus do one half of the world live as alms-folks on the eaint for every infirmity, as Pelronella, for gout, ague, and poison; St. Romanus, for demo- niacs ; Valentine, for epilepsy; St. Vitus, for palsy or mania ; St. Anthony, for erysipelas; as the ancients, according to Pliny, had gods for all their diseases, and temples for each. We find even in Bellarmine and Gregory Tolsanus numerous examples of cures performed by these superstitious mummeries. At Poictiers, in France, as late as 1617, it was pretended that St. Hilary's bed was to be seen, and hundreds of the insane were carried there yearly from all parts of the country, to be restored. St. Ciricius's staff had a great reputation in this disease, as well as the names of the Three Kings of Cohen, written in parchment and hung around the neck of the patient, with the sign of the cross. The evil, however, had risen to so great a height, that it became absolutely necessary to impose some check upon the rapacity of the monks; and, accordingly, at the Council of Lateran, held in 1123, they, together with the priests, were peremptorily forbidden to at- tend upon the sick, except as ministers of the consolations of religion. This prohibition not proving successful, it was repeated by the Council of Rheims in 1131, and also by the Second Lateran Council in 1139, accompanied with the severest penalties to those who, "neglecting the sacred objects of the.ir own profession, hold out the delusive hope of health in exchange for ungodly lucre ;" and ordaining that " all bishops, abbots, and priors, who connived at such proceedings of the clergy within their respective jurisdictions, should be suspended from their ecclesiastical functions." But even this measure did not entirely banish the evil, which has existed to a greater or less extent even to the present day; for we find some, at least, of the clergy of the Romish Church claiming the power of healing the sick, by the aid of some saint or relic, and by performing miracles. Clerical interfe- rence in the healing art has, however, by no means been confined to the clergy of that church or to the Dark Ages ; and, however unaccountable it may seem, their influence is too often, in our own day, exerted in the promotion of every system of quackery. Thus, Thomsonianism and homoeopathy have derived their chief support from the clergy, and it is very doubtful whether either of them could have obtained any considerable foothold amon<* us had it not been for their ardent, though blind advocacy.—Am. Ed. 48 THERIACA ANDROMACHI.--MITHRADATE. opinions of the other half. What but such a temper could have upheld the preposterous system of Galen for more than thirteen centuries and have enabled it to give universal laws in medicine to Europe, Africa and part of Asia ?• What, but the spell of authority could have inspired a general belief that the sooty washings of resin could act as a universal remedy ?t What, but a blind devotion to authority, or an insuperable attachment to established custom and routine, could have so long pre- served from oblivion the absurd medicines which abound in our earlier dispensatories ? for example, the « Decoctum ad Ictericos of the Edin- burgh Colleoe, which never had any foundation but that of the doctrine of signatures,! in favour of the Curcuma and Chelidonmm majus; and it is only within a few years that the Theriaca Andromachi, in its ancient form, has been dismissed from our Pharmacopoeia.§ The Codex Me- dicamentarius of Paris still cherishes the many-headed monster of pharmacy, under the appropriate title of " Electuanum Opiatum Polu- pharmacum."\\ It is, however, evidently indebted for this unexpected rescue Irom oblivion to a cause very remote from that which may be at first imagined ; * Massaria a learned professor of Pavia, in the sixteenth century, absolutely declared that he would rather err with Galen than be in the right with any other physician + This practice of Bishop Berkeley has been ridiculed with great point and effect in a pamphlet entitled " A Cure for the Epidemical Madness of drinking Tar-water," by A Reeve; in which, addressing the bishop, he says, " Thus, in your younger days, my lord, you made the surprising discovery of the unreality of matter, and now, in your riper age you have undertaken to prove the reality of a universal remedy; an attempt to talk men out of their reason did of right belong to that author who had first tried to persuade them out of their senses." Tar-water was also, at one time, supposed to possess very con- siderable virtues in syphilis. X The Euphrasia Officinalis, or Eye-bright, which is indebted for its celebrity to the doc- trine of signatures, as before stated, is employed at this day in cases of dimness of sight. See a paper upon the efficacy of this plant by Dr. Jackson, in the London Medical and Phys- ical Journal, vol. xxiii., p. 104. § Its rejection was proposed by the late Dr. Heberden, and, upon the college dividing on the question, there were found to be thirteen votes for retaining, and fourteen for reject- ing it. II This preparation consists of seventy-two ingredients, which are arranged under thir- teen heads, viz.: Acria, of which there are five species ; Amara, of which there are eight; styptica vulgo Astringentia, five in number; Aromatica Exotica, fourteen; Aro- matica Indiuena, ten; Aromatica ex Umbelliferis, seven; Resinosa et Balsama, eight; Grave Olentia, six ; Virosa, seu quae Narcosin inducunt, under which head there is but one species, viz., opium; Terrea Insipida et Inertia, this comprises only the Lemnian earth; Gummosa, Amylacea, &c, four species; Dulcia, liquorice and honey; Vinum, Spanish. Upon no principle of combination can this heterogeneous farrago be vindicated. It has, however, enjoyed the confidence of physicians for many ages, and is therefore entitled to some notice. It was supposed to have been invented by Mithradates, the famous King of Pontus, the receipt for which was said to have been found among his papers after his de- feat by Pompey, at which time it was published in Rome, under the title of " Antidotum Mithradatium." "But the probability is," says Dr. Heberden, "that Mithradates was aa much a stranger to his own antidote as several eminent physicians have since been to the medicines that are daily advertised under their names. It was asserted, that whoever took a proper quantity in the morning, was ensured from poison during the whole of that day (Galen, de Antidot., lib. i.); and it was farther stated, that Mithradates himself was so forti- fied against all baneful drugs, that none would produce any effect when he attempted to destroy himself.—(Celsus, lib. v., c. xxiii.) In the course of ages it has undergone numer- ous alterations. According to Celsus, who first described it, it contained only thirty-five simples; Andromachus, physician to Nero, added vipers, and increased the number of in- gredients to seventy-five; and when thus reformed, he called it yaXf/vrj: but in Trajan's time it obtained the name of Theriaca, either from the vipers in it, or from its supposed ef- fects in curing the bites of venomous animals. Damocrates gave a receipt for it in Greek iambics, which has been preserved by Galen. It appears, then, that its composition has hardly remained the same for a hundred years; " it is," says Dr. Heberden, " a farrago, that has no better title to the name of Mithradates, than as it so well resembles the numerous undisciplined forces of a barbarous king made up of a dissonant crowd collected from dif- ferent countries, mighty in appearance, but, in reality, an ineffective multitude, that only hinder each other."—ANTIOHPIAKA, by W. Heberden, M.D., 1745. INTRODUCTION OF IPECACUAN--TOBACCO. 49 not from any belief in its powers, or reliance upon its efficacy, but from a passive acquiescence in a generally-received opinion, and a disincli- nation to oppose popular prejudice, or to reject what has been established by authority and sanctioned by time. For the same reason, and in vio- lation of their better judgment, the editors have retained the absurd for- mula of Diest for the preparation of an extract of opium, which, after directing various successive operations, concludes by ordering the decoc- tion to be boiled incessantly for six months, supplying the waste of water at intervals ! Many of the compound formulae in this Codex, it is frankly allowed, possess an unnecessary and unmeaning, if not an in- jurious complexity ; and yet such force has habit, and so paramount are the verba magistri, that the editors are satisfied in distinguishing the more important ingredients by printing them in italics, leaving the rest to be supplied at the whim and caprice of the dispenser ; and thus are the grand objects and use of a national Pharmacopoeia defeated, which should above all things ensure uniformity in the strength and composition of its officinal preparations. The same devotion to authority which induces us to retain an accus- tomed remedy with pertinacity, will frequently oppose the introduction of a novel practice with asperity, unless, indeed, it be supported by au- thority of still greater weight and consideration. The history of various articles of diet and medicine will prove in a striking manner how greatly their reputation and fate have depended upon authority. It was not until many years after ipecacuan had been imported into Europe, that Helvetius, under the patronage of Louis XIV., succeeded in introducing it into practice ; and to the eulogy of Katharine, queen of Charles II., we are indebted for the general introduction of tea into England.* That most extraordinary plantf tobacco, notwithstanding its powers of * The consumption of tea has greatly increased in England during the last thirty years. In 1787, the total amounted to sixteen millions of pounds, whereas in 1821 it exceeded twenty-two millions. t Hernandez de Toledo sent this plant into Spain and Portugal in 1559, when Jean Ni- cot was ambassador at the court of Lisbon from Francis II., and he transmitted, or carried either the seed or the plant to Catharine de Medicis : it was then considered as one of the wonders of the New World, and was supposed to possess very extraordinary virtues: this seems to be the first authentic record of the introduction of this plant into Europe. In 1589, the Cardinal Santa Croce, returning from his nunciature in Spain and Portugal to Italy, carried thither with him tobacco, and we may form some notion of the enthusiasm with which its production was hailed, from a perusal of the poetry which the subject in- spired ; the poets compare the exploit of the holy cardinal with that of his progenitor, who brought home the wood of the true cross. ......" Herb of immortal fame ! Which hither first with Santa Croce came, When he, his time of nunciature expired, Back from the court of Portugal retired ; Even as his predecessor, great and good, Brought home the cross." In England, it is said that the smoking tobacco was first introduced by Sir Walter Ra- leigh on his return from America. James the First wrote a philippic against it, entitled " A Counterblaste to Tobacco," in which the royal author, with more prejudice than dignity, informs his loving subjects that " it is a custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs; and in the blacke, stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stygian smoake of the pit that is bottomlesse." In 1604, this monarch endeavoured, by means of heavy imposts, to abolish its use in this coun- try ; and in 1619 he commanded that no planter in Virginia should cultivate more than one hundred pounds. It must be confessed that some legislative enactment was necessary at this period for restricting the custom of smoking tobacco, for we are told in the Counter- blaste, that many persons expended as much as five hundred pounds per annum in the pur- chase' of this article, which, in those days, was an enormous amount. In 1624, Pope Urban the VIHth published a decree of excommunication against all who 50 VALUABLE APPLICATIONS OF THE POTATO. fascination, has suffered romantic vicissitudes in its fame and character; it has been successively opposed and commended by physicians con- demned and eulogized by priests and kings—and proscribed and pro- tected by governments; while at length this once insignificant produc- tion of a little island, or an obscure district, has succeeded in diffusing itself through every climate, and in subjecting the inhabitants ot every country to its dominion. The Arab cultivates it in the burning desert— the Laplander and Esquimaux risk their lives to procure a refreshment so delicious in their wintery solitude—the seaman, grant aim but this luxury, and he will endure with cheerfulness every other privation, and defy the fury of the raging elements; and in the higher walks of civil- ized society, at the shrine of fashion, in the palace, and in the cottage, the fascinating influence of this singular plant commands an equal tribute of devotion and attachment. The history of the potato is perhaps not less extraordinary, and is strikingly illustrative of the omnipotent influence of authority. The in- troduction of this valuable plant received, for more than two centuries, an unexampled opposition from vulgar prejudice, which all the philoso- phy of the age was unable to dissipate, until Louis the Fifteenth wore a bunch of the°flowers of the potato, in the midst of his court, on a day of festivity; the people then, for the first time, obsequiously acknowledged its utility, and ventured to express their astonishment at the apathy which had so long prevlaied with regard to its general cultivation. That which authority thus established, time and experience have fully ratified, and scientific research has extended the numerous resources which this plant is so wonderfully calculated to furnish; thus its stalk, considered as a textile plant, produces in Austria a cottony flax—in Sweden, sugar is extracted from its root—by combustion, its different parts yield a very considerable quantity of potass—its apples, when ripe, ferment and yield vinegar by exposure, or spirit by distillation— its tubercles, made into a pulp, are a substitute for soap, in bleaching— cooked by steam, the potato is the most wholesome and nutritious, and, at the same time, the most economical of all vegetable aliments*—by different manipulations it furnishes two kinds of flour, a gruel and a pa- took snuff in the Church. Ten years after this, smoking was forbidden in Russia, under the pain of having the nose cut off; in 1653, the Council of the Canton of Appenzel cited smokers before them, whom they punished, and they ordered all innkeepers to inform against such as were found smoking in their houses. The police regulations of Bern, made in 1661, were divided according to the Ten Commandments, in which the prohibition of smoking stands immediately beneath the command against adultery; this prohibition was renewed in 1675, and the tribunal instituted to put it into execution, viz., Chamereau Ta- bac, continued to the middle of the eighteenth century. Pope Innocent the Xllth, in 1690, excommunicated all those who were found taking snuff or tobacco in the Church of St. Peter, at Rome; even so late as 1719, the Senate of Strasburgh prohibited the cultivation of tobacco, from an apprehension that it would diminish the growth of corn ; Amurath the IVth published an edict which made smoking tobacco a capital offence; this was founded on an opinion that it rendered the people infertile. Those who are curious to learn more of the history of this extraordinary plant, I beg to refer to a very interesting paper by " Medicus," in the twenty-fourth volume of the " London Medical and Physical Journal," page 445, and more especially to an elaborate " Essay on Tobacco," by H. W. Cleland, M.D., Lecturer on Medical Jurisprudence, Glasgow. "Tobacco," says old Burton, "divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far be- yond all their panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases. A good vomit, I confess; a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely ta- ken, and medicinally used; but, as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health; hellish, devilish, and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul."—(An Mel vol. n., 109.)—Am. Ed. v ' -.*«* Y*1^ °lher discovery or invention ever produced such political consequences as the introduction of the potato as an article of food ? From its operation as the main constitu- THE WARM AND COLD BATH.--PERUVIAN BARK. 51 renchyma, which, in times of scarcity, may be made into bread, or ap- plied to increase the bulk of bread made from grain—to the invalid it furnishes both aliment and medicine : its starch is not in the least infe- rior to the Indian arrow-root; and Dr. Latham has shown that an ex- tract may be prepared from its leaves and flowers which possesses prop- erties as an anodyne remedy* The history of the warm bathf presents us with another curious in- stance of the vicissitudes to which the reputation of our valuable resour- ces is so universally exposed; that which, for so many ages, was es- teemed the greatest luxury in health,^ and the most efficacious remedy in disease, fell into total disrepute in the reign of Augustus, for no other reason than because Antonius Musa had cured the emperor of a danger- ous malady by the use of the cold bath. The most frigid water that could be procured was, in consequence, recommended on every occa- sion: thus Horace, in his epistle to Vala, exclaims, " Caput ac stomachum supponere fontibus audent Clusinis, gabiosque petunt, et frigida rura."—Epist. xv., lib. i. This practice, however, was doomed but to an ephemeral popularity, for, although it had restored the emperor to health, it shortly afterward killed his nephew and son-in-law, Marcellus; an event which at once deprived the remedy of its credit and the physician of his popularity. The history of the Peruvian bark would furnish a very curious illus- tration of the overbearing influence of authority in giving celebrity to a medicine, or in depriving it of that reputation to which its virtues entitle it. This heroic remedy was first brought to Spain in the year 1632, and we learn from Villerobel that it remained for seven years in that country before any trial was made of its powers, a certain ecclesiastic of Alcala being the first person in Spain to whom it was administered, in the year 1639 ; but even at this period its use was limited, and it would have sunk into oblivion but for the supreme power of the Roman Church, by whose auspices it was enabled to gain a temporary triumph over the passions and prejudices which opposed its introduction. Inno- cent the Tenth, at the intercession of Cardinal de Lugo, who was for- merly a Spanish Jesuit, ordered that the nature and effects of it should be duly examined, and, upon being reported as both innocent and salu- tary, it immediately rose into public notice ;$ its career, however, was suddenly stopped, by its having unfortunately failed, in the autumn of 1652, to cure Leopold, archduke of Austria, of a quartan intermittent; this disappointment kindled the resentment of the prince's principal phy- sician, Chifletius, who published a violent philippic against the virtues of Peruvian bark, which so fomented the prejudices against its use, that it had nearly fallen into total neglect and disrepute. Thus there exists a fashion in medicine, as in the other affairs of life, regulated by the caprice, and supported by the authority of a few ent of national sustenance, the population of Ireland has advanced from little more than one million to near seven millions within the last century and a half! * Med. Trans, of the College of Physicians, vol. vi., p. 92. t That the warm, and not the cold bath, was esteemed by the ancient Greeks for its in- vigorating properties, may be inferred from a dialogue of Aristophanes, in which one of the characters says, " I think none of the sons of the gods ever exceeded Hercules in bodily and mental force ;" upon which the other asks, " Where didst thou ever see a cold bath dedicated to Hercules?" i The prohibition of the bath was numbered among the mortifications to which certain priestesses in Greece were bound by the rigid rules of their order. -carbonate of the former; such a change in name, however, was the consequence of enlarged views, and was therefore indis- pensable ; the terms sub and super, when prefixed to the generic name of a salt, originally denoted an excess of acid or of base, as indicated by the predominance of its acid or alkaline qualities ; but these terms have been discarded from our vocabulary, and in their place we have a more perfect nomenclature,! founded upon the theory of proportionals, or the atomic doctrine, which not only expresses the excess of the acid, or that of the base, but the exact proportion of such excess, without reference to its sensible quali- ties. I am not prepared to say that the adoption of arbitrary * Calomel.—There is some doubt respecting the original meaning of this word: it liter- ally signifies fair, black, Ka\og, /uXaj. Sir Theodore Mayerne is said to have given the name to it, in consequence of his having a favourite black servant who prepared it; but is it not more probable that its name was derived from the change of colour which it under- goes from black to white during its preparation ? Another explanation has been also given, viz. : quod nigro humori sit bonum—a good (