Serapion the Younger was an Arabian physician who lived towards the end of the tenth century and wrote a work on materia medica which was much used for some five or six hundred years.
Mesuë the Elder was first physician at the court of Haroun-al-Raschid in the ninth century. He was born at Khouz, near Nineveh, in 776, and died at Bagdad in 855. Under his superintendence the School of Medicine of Bagdad was founded by Haroun. Although a Nestorian Christian, Mesuë retained his position as first physician to five Caliphs after Haroun. To his teaching the introduction of the milder purgatives, such as senna, tamarinds, and certain fruits is supposed to be due. His Arabic name was Jahiah-Ebn-Masawaih.
Mesuë the Younger is the authority generally meant when formulas under his name, sometimes quaintly called Dr. Mesuë in old English books, are quoted. He lived at Cairo about the year 1000. He was a Christian, like his earlier namesake, and is believed to have been a pupil or perhaps a companion of Avicenna; at all events, when the latter got into disgrace it is alleged that both he and Mesuë took refuge in Damascus. At Damascus Mesuë wrote his great work known in Latin as Receptarium Antidotarii. From the time of the invention of printing down to the middle of the seventeenth century, when pharmacopœias became general, more than seventy editions of this work, mostly in Latin, but a few in Italian, have been counted. In some of the Latin translations he is described as “John, the son of Mesuë, the son of Hamech, the son of Abdel, king of Damascus.” This dignity has been traced to a confusion of the Arabic names, one of which was very similar to the word meaning king. Nearly half of the formulæ in the first London Pharmacopœia were quoted from him.
Nicolas Myrepsus.
For several centuries before the era of modern pharmacopœias the Antidotary of Nicolas Myrepsus was the standard formulary, and from this the early dispensatories were largely compiled. This Nicolas, who was not the Nicolas Praepositus of Salerno, is sometimes named Nicolas Alexandrinus. He appears to have been a practising physician at Constantinople, and as he bore the title of Actuarius, it is supposed that he was physician to the Emperor. He is believed to have lived in the thirteenth century. Myrepsus, which means ointment maker, was a name which he assumed or which was applied to him, probably in allusion to his Antidotary.
This was the largest and most catholic of all the collections of medical formulas which had then appeared. Galen and the Greek physicians, the Arabs, Jews, and Christians who had written on medicine, were all drawn upon. A Latin translation by Leonard Fuchs, published at Nuremberg in 1658, contains 2,656 prescriptions, every possible illness being thus provided against. The title page declares the work to be “Useful as well for the medical profession and for the seplasarii.” The original is said to have been written in barbarous Greek.
Sprengel, who has hardly patience to devote a single page to this famous Antidotary, tells us that the compiler was grossly ignorant and superstitious. He gives an instance of his reproduction of some Arab formulæ. One is the use of arsenic as a spice to counteract the deadly effects of poisons. This advice was copied, he says, down to the seventeenth century. It was Nicolas’s rendering of the Arabic word Darsini, which meant cannella, and which they so named because it was brought from China.
The compounds collected in this Antidotary are of the familiar complicated character of which so many specimens are given in this volume. Many of the titles are curious and probably reminiscent of the pious credulity of the period when Myrepsus lived. There is, for example, the Salt of the Holy Apostles, which taken morning and evening with meals, would preserve the sight, prevent the hair from falling out, relieve difficulty of breathing, and keep the breath sweet. It was obtained by grinding together a mixture of herbs and seeds (hyssop, wild carrot, cummin, pennyroyal, and pepper) with common salt. The Salt of St. Luke was similar but contained a few more ingredients.
A Sal Purgatorius prescribed for the Pope Nicholas consisted of sal ammoniac, 3 oz., scammony, 3 drachms, poppy seeds, 2 drachms, orris root, 3 drachms, pepper, 13 grains, one date, pine nut 25 grains, and squill 2 drachms. This might be made into an electuary with honey.