CHAPTER XXV. Brief History of the Allied Sciences--Pharmacy, Chemistry and

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ALLIED SCIENCES--PHARMACY, CHEMISTRY AND BALNEOTHERAPEUTICS

During the excavations carried on at the site of Pompeii, there were discovered three houses which bore every appearance of having been occupied by apothecaries. Among the objects found in these buildings were: A bronze box equipped with the apparatus required for mixing ointments; a few surgical instruments; several glass receptacles which had evidently at some earlier period contained fluid or semi-fluid pharmaceutical preparations, but which, at the time when the excavations were made, presented merely a deposit of some solid but easily friable substance at the bottom of the vessel; and quite a variety of drugs in the form of pills, tablets, powders, etc. At first, the impression prevailed that these must have been the houses of apothecaries, but subsequently the discovery, in each instance, of the house sign representing a snake with a pine cone in its mouth (the symbol of Aesculapius) satisfied the authorities that these particular buildings had belonged to physicians. Indeed, as a matter of fact, no good reasons have thus far been found for believing that apothecaries, in the modern acceptation of the term, existed in even the largest cities of Greece and Italy until a much later date.

Pharmacy in Its Infancy.--All through the Hippocratic period and during the years when Alexandria was at the height of its prosperity as the great centre of medical activity, it was customary for the physicians to prepare their own drugs. The same is true of the best physicians belonging to the Augustan period; they were not willing to put their trust in the drugs which had been prepared in the shops where such things were usually sold.

In the second century of the present era Galen gave the definition that a remedial drug, or “Pharmakon,” was something which, when taken into the living body, produces an alteration in its component tissues or organs, whereas foods or nutrient elements simply cause an increase of the parts. He attached great importance to such characteristics as purity, freshness, care in handling, etc. It was his custom to prepare with his own hands the different combinations of simple remedial agents which he administered to his patients, and he kept these combinations, as well as the simple drugs of the more costly kinds, carefully stored in locked wooden boxes in a room which was devoted to this special purpose and which was termed the “Apotheke.” Originally, therefore, the “apothecary” was simply the person who had charge of this room in which the drugs and spices were carefully “placed to one side” (ἀπό, τίθημι) for safe keeping. At a later period, when the caretaker became also the compounder of drugs, another word of a more comprehensive significance--that of “pharmacist”--gradually supplanted the term apothecary.

There is another word, “antidote,” which has very materially changed its significance during the lapse of centuries. Galen, for example, employed this word as a synonym of pharmakon--a simple remedial agent, and medical writers continued using the term in this sense during the following thirteen or fourteen centuries. The word commonly employed, by mediaeval physicians, to signify “pharmacopoeia,” was “antidotarium.” In modern times the word “antidote” signifies only an agent which neutralizes a poison.

Galen took a very great interest in everything relating to the subject of drugs, and sometimes made long journeys for the purpose of securing certain plants or roots which he was unable to procure near home or which he was very anxious to obtain in a more perfect condition than was possible when they were purchased from the regular dealers. “Simple remedies,” he declared, “are pure and unadulterated, and produce effects in only one direction. It is the business of pharmacology to combine drugs in such a manner--according to their elementary qualities of heat, cold, moistness and dryness--as shall render them effective in combating or overcoming the conditions which exist in the different diseases.” Galen’s interest in pharmacology materially aided the advance of medical science in other ways. He systematized the existing knowledge of materia medica and infused some measure of orderliness into the therapeutics of his day. The success of his efforts in this direction did not become manifest until after he had been dead about fifty years; but, if his ideas were slow in meeting with general acceptance, they took such deep root in the minds of physicians that to-day in Persia Galen’s system of therapeutics is the only one generally received as authoritative. Although the facts do not warrant our making the same statement with regard to Western and Southern Europe, it is nevertheless true that our dispensatories still continue to honor the memory of this great physician by bestowing the name of “Galenical Preparations” on a large group of pharmaceutical combinations.

It is scarcely possible to state with any degree of positiveness at what date pharmacists, in the modern sense of the term, came to be recognized as constituting a separate and honorable class in every well-organized community. It is known, however, that in Syria and Persia, during the eighth and ninth centuries of the present era, not a few of the leading physicians were the sons of apothecaries. Honein, for example, of whose career I furnished a brief sketch in Chapter XIX., was the son of an apothecary; and the careful manner in which he was educated during his youth justifies the belief that his father must have been a man of some cultivation and not at all like the general average of that class of men of whom Galen speaks so disparagingly. But even at that early period there certainly were individuals who were skilled in the pharmaceutic art, for Berendes (op. cit.) tells us that Dioscorides (circa 100 A. D.) describes minutely the manner of preparing “Oisypum.” Oisypum is identical with the modern “Lanolin” or “Lanolinum,” and is a pure fat of wool. Mention is made of the preparation by four different authors of medical treatises during the following sixteen centuries--viz., by Aëtius in the sixth, by Paulus Aegineta in the seventh, by Nicolaus Myrepsus in the thirteenth, and by Valerius Cordus in the seventeenth. Subsequently to the latter date no further mention of the preparation is to be found in any of the pharmacopoeias except the French Codex of the year 1758, in which it is classed among the simple remedies under the title of “Oesipe.” Finally Liebreich, toward the end of the nineteenth century, brought the preparation once more into favor under the name of “lanolin.” The fact that it remained in complete oblivion for such very long periods of time is easily explained by the statement which Berendes makes: “It was a troublesome ointment to manufacture, and consequently the apothecaries disliked it and resorted to all sorts of falsifications.”

With the advance of the Arab Renaissance pharmacy gradually became a regular established occupation in every fairly large city in the East. It is known, for example, that the first public apothecary shop in the city of Bagdad was established during the eighth century of the present era under the caliphate of Almansur; and about the same time, probably a little earlier, there existed at Djondisabour a similar pharmacy in connection with the school and hospital of the Bakhtichou family. The training of an apothecary in those days was probably the same as that of the physician. Originally pharmacists were called “Szandalani,” probably because they dealt largely in sandal wood.

The materia medica furnished by the Arab physician Rhazes in the different works which he has written, is unusually rich in simple elements, the majority of which are always drugs of a rather mild action; Greece, Persia, Syria, East India and Egypt were the sources from which they were derived. Beside the simple elements, Rhazes mentions a number of composite preparations of drugs. As not a few of the latter required very careful manipulation, it may safely be inferred that the Arabian apothecaries of the ninth century had already acquired considerable skill and experience in their special field of work.

At Salerno, during the first half of the twelfth century, pharmacy began to assume a position of considerable importance. The work which was prepared by Nicolaus Praepositus, and which was known as an “Antidotarium,” furnished quite full information with regard to the characters and therapeutic uses of nearly 150 different drugs. According to Berendes this work served for several centuries as the basis of later pharmacopoeias. One of its notable features is the importance which the author attaches to the duty of weighing very carefully each of the drugs that enter into the composition of a given preparation, of gathering certain vegetable products at the right season, and of paying strict attention to their quality and to the manner of preserving them.

In 1140 A. D., Roger, King of Naples and Sicily, promulgated a law which defined what should be the proper relations between physicians and apothecaries; and about one hundred years later (1241 A. D.) Frederick II. amplified and gave greater precision to this law, thus establishing what was practically an Institute of Apothecaries. The following provisions constitute the essential features of the law:--

1. The physician and the apothecary shall have no business interests in common.

2. The physician shall not himself conduct an apothecary shop.

3. In each department of the kingdom two respectable men, selected by the Faculty at Salerno, shall be assigned the duty of furnishing sworn statements to the effect that all the electuaries, syrups, and other preparations of drugs kept for sale in a given apothecary shop, have been made according to the established prescriptions and are offered for sale only in that state.

4. In the case of those preparations which ordinarily do not keep for a longer time than one year without spoiling, the price at which they are to be sold shall be at the rate of 3 Tarreni (about 30 cents) per ounce; while those which ordinarily remain unchanged during a longer period, shall be valued at 6 Tarreni per ounce.

At the time which we are now considering, it was not the custom, owing largely to the expensiveness of writing paper, to deliver to the pharmacist a written prescription. Instead, the physician first gave his instructions in person, and then, after he had seen the mixing and other steps of the apothecary’s work properly performed, he carried the preparation to the patient’s house.

Long before the middle of the fifteenth century apothecaries had become thoroughly well established throughout Central and Western Europe. Among the statutes of the Medical Faculty of Erfurt, Germany, there has been found one which dates back to the year 1412 and which says:--

The student of medicine, before he applies for the Bachelor’s Degree, should spend one month in the spring of the year, in an apothecary’s establishment, in order that he may familiarize himself with the proper manner of preparing clysters, suppositories, pessaries, syrups, electuaries and other things necessary for a physician to know.

The first work which was really worthy of being termed a treatise on materia medica was published in 1447. It bore the title, “Compendium Aromatariorum,” and was written by Saladin of Ascolo, the private physician of Prince Antonio de Balza Ossino of Tarentum. Berendes says that it was a work of much practical value.

The First Indications of the Beginning of Chemistry.--Up to a comparatively recent date it has been customary to speak of Geber as the first practical chemist and the first writer among the ancients who appreciated the important part which chemistry was likely to take in medicine and philosophy at no distant period of time. But to-day, as appears from the researches made by M. Berthelot about 1893, we are compelled to abandon the belief that such a person as Geber existed, and shall have to adopt the more commonplace view that the science of chemistry represents a gradual development from the much older alchemy. We may define the latter branch of knowledge as the science of transforming copper and brass into gold and silver. During the first two or three centuries of the Christian era there existed a firm belief that such a transformation had actually been accomplished, and in confirmation of the correctness of this statement it may be said that Zosimos of Panopolis, one of the leading philosophers of Alexandria during the fourth century of the present era, and a man who was considered by his contemporaries, as well as by all later alchemists, to be perhaps the greatest authority in this branch of knowledge, speaks in unmistakable terms in his cyclopaedic work on alchemy (28 volumes), of a certain tincture which possesses the power of changing silver into gold, and also of a “divine water” or fluid which is capable of effecting many different transmutations. There can therefore be no reasonable doubt that in the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages the learned men of Alexandria accepted alchemy as a well-established agency of great power. From the sixth century to the thirteenth this science was cultivated with great assiduity by the Arabs in the academies which they established in Cordova and other cities of Spain; and it was from the latter region that the belief in alchemy spread to all the countries of Western Europe, gradually gaining strength up to perhaps the fifteenth century.

It was during the thirteenth century that the so-called “philosophers’ stone” came to be considered the most effective agent in transmuting the baser metals into silver and gold, and there were not a few who even believed that this as yet non-existent stone possessed the power to increase longevity, to confer health, and to give a prosperous issue to one’s undertakings. It was not the rabble, but the very best and most highly educated men in the community who, during the thirteenth century, took the most active interest in alchemy and the philosophers’ stone. Arnold of Villanova, Raymund Lullus, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and, to a lesser degree, the famous theologian Thomas Aquinas were all believers in the art of the magician. And even more extraordinary than this is the fact that in Germany men of this stamp continued for two or three centuries longer to cherish a belief in the reality of alchemistic processes. Even Martin Luther (1483–1546), the great reformer, did not hesitate to express his approval of “the black art,” as is shown by the following quotation from one of his writings:--

The art of alchemy is commendable and belongs in truth to the philosophy of the ancient wise men, a fact which pleases me greatly, not merely because of the intrinsic merits and usefulness of the art in the matter of distillations of vegetables and oily fluids and sublimation of metals, but also because it serves as such a noble and beautiful symbol of the resurrection of the dead at the last day of judgment. (Berendes.)

Another celebrated character who dabbled in the black art was Johannes Faust, who was born in 1485, obtained his degree of Bachelor of Arts at the University of Heidelberg, and died in 1540 in Staufen in Breisgau. Professor Scherer of Berlin says that “he was a great braggart, never failed to create a sensation wherever he went, and had the conceit and effrontery to pass himself off as a scientist among the learned men of his day. He called himself the philosopher of philosophers, a second Magus. He maintained that he was both a physician and an astrologer, and claimed that he could restore the dead to life, and could predict future events from a mere inspection of fire, air and water.”

But although the persistent and wonderfully energetic activities of the alchemists failed to find the philosophers’ stone, or to transmute the baser metals into silver and gold, they placed in the hands of man the key to a knowledge of chemistry, that branch of science which was destined in later years to play such an important part in pharmacy, in agriculture and in other industries. Thus we owe to alchemists the discovery of many processes and the invention of many apparatus which serve as the groundwork of modern chemistry. Some of the more important of these are the following: The use of the spirit lamp; the invention of tubular retorts; the production of potash and soda by burning the hard deposit which collects in wine casks as well as various marine plants; the oxidizing of certain metals (iron, lead, copper, quicksilver and antimony); the making of metallic arsenic, of wine of antimony, of sulphate of iron, of chloride of silver, of acetic acid and of many other chemical products; the purification of metals by the use of lead, etc.

Supplementary Data Relating to Balneotherapeutics.--I have referred to this subject on several occasions in the course of the earlier chapters of this history, but always without entering very much into details. This policy was adopted, partly because the facts upon which a satisfactory sketch of the growth of balneotherapeutics might be based were not very numerous, and partly because of the necessity of gaining space for more important matters.

The principal facts to which I made reference were: First, that before the Christian era the employment of baths in a variety of different ways for therapeutic purposes was universal in the East; and, second, that in the city of Rome during the centuries immediately following the birth of Christ, facilities for this kind of treatment were provided on a most lavish scale--as in the baths of Agrippa (27 A. D.), of Titus (79 A. D.), of Caracalla (211 A. D.), and of Diocletian (302 A. D.). I may now add that the warm springs of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden, in Central Europe, and Bath, in England, were known to the ancient Romans, and were utilized by them to some extent for therapeutic purposes; but it was not until a much later period that they and the less well-known springs of Schwalbach, Driburg, Warmbrunn, Goeppingen and Gastein began to be actively frequented for remedial purposes. By the beginning of the sixteenth century it had become a very popular thing for sufferers from all sorts of ailments to resort to these and other European springs. The history of the therapeutic employment of mineral waters belongs, however, to the period of modern medicine rather than to that which I have been considering in the present volume.