CHRONICLES OF PHARMACY
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
CHRONICLES OF
PHARMACY
BY
A. C. WOOTTON
VOL. I
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1910
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
PREFACE
Pharmacy, or the art of selecting, extracting, preparing, andcompounding medicines from vegetable, animal, and mineral substances,is an acquirement which must have been almost as ancient as man himselfon the earth. In experimenting with fruits, seeds, leaves, or rootswith a view to the discovery of varieties of food, our remote ancestorswould occasionally find some of these, which, though not tempting tothe palate, possessed this or that property the value of which wouldsoon come to be recognised. The tradition of these virtues would behanded down from generation to generation, and would ultimately become,by various means, the heritage of the conquering and civilising races.Of the hundreds of drugs yielded by the vegetable kingdom, collectedfrom all parts of the world, and used as remedies, in some cases forthousands of years, I do not know of a single one which can surely betraced to any historic or scientific personage. It is possible in manyinstances to ascertain the exact or approximate date when a particularsubstance was introduced to our markets, and sometimes to name thephysician, explorer, merchant, or conqueror to whom we are indebtedfor[vi] such an addition to our materia medica; but there is always ahistory or a tradition behind our acquaintance with the new medicine,going back to an undetermined past.
In modern dispensatories the ever increasing accumulation of chemical,botanical, histological, and therapeutic notes has tended to crowd outthe historic paragraphs which brightened the older treatises. Perhapsthis result is inevitable, but it is none the less to be regretted onaccount of both the student and the adept in the art of pharmacy. “Ihave always thought,” wrote Ferdinand Hoefer in the Introduction to hisstill valuable “History of Chemistry” (1842), “that the best methodof popularising scientific studies, generally so little attractive,consists in presenting, as in a panorama, the different phases ascience has passed through from its origin to its present condition.”No science nor, indeed, any single item of knowledge, can be properlyappreciated apart from the records of its evolution; and it is asimportant to be acquainted with the errors and misleading theorieswhich have prevailed in regard to it, as with the steps by which realprogress has been made.
The history of drugs, investigations into their cultivation, theircommerce, their constitution, and their therapeutic effects, havebeen dealt with by physicians and pharmacologists of the highestemine