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.)