The materia medica of the old apothecary was largely drawn from the animal kingdom, the greater part of it being, no doubt, handed down from a very early period, when witchcraft and superstition exerted a powerful influence on the minds of the people.
Among the many curious things used, we find that the liver of a mad dog, or a wolf, washed in wine and dried in a stove, was employed as a remedy for hydrophobia. The nimble lizard had a reputation as a sudorific and antisyphilitic. Dried toads and the cast-off skins of snakes and adders, were administered in dropsy as a diuretic.
The horn of rhinoceros was used in epilepsy, and goat’s blood and eel’s liver as a cure for dysentery. The oil of frog’s spawn was celebrated as an application for chilblains. The jawbone of a pike and the spine of a lamprey in powder, were prescribed for leucorrhœa. Pepys mentions in his diary, that he wore a hare’s foot as a sovereign remedy against the plague, in which charm he seemed to place more faith than in the various plague waters that were recommended to him as unfailing antidotes for that terrible disease.
In the time of Edward I. there was a list of drugs recorded by the king’s physician, one Nicholas de Tyngewyke, in 1307, which throws an interesting light on the pharmacy of that period. The list includes distilled oil of turpentine, aromatic flowers for baths, carminative electuaries, plasters and ointments of various kinds, the oils of wheat, ash, and bay, water of the roses of Damascus, wine of pomegranates, remedies prepared from pearls, jacinths, and coral, and many other drugs. The king was taken ill at Carlisle, and the cost of conveying these remedies from London to that city amounted to £159 11s. 10d., the apothecary’s bill for the medicines being £134 16s. 4d.
In 1596 Sir Henry Winton, who was sent as ambassador by Elizabeth to Henry IV. of France, met with an accident while on his mission. According to the records “he was physicked with confectio alcarmas, which was composed of musk, amber, gold, pearl, and unicorn’s horn, and with pigeons applied to his side, and all other means that art could devise sufficient to expel the strongest poison, and he be not bewitcht withall”.
The apothecaries of the seventeenth century were not overburdened with the estimable virtue of modesty, as instanced in the following quaint announcement:—
“Cornelius Tilbury, sworn chirurgeon-in-ordinary to K. Charles II., to his late Sovereign K. William, as also to her present Majesty Queen Anne—address at the Blue Flower Pot, in Great Lincoln’s Inn Fields, at Holbourn Row (where you see at night a light over the door); and for the convenience of those that desire privacy, they may come through the Red Lyon Inn in Holbourn, between the two turnstiles, which is directly against my back door, where you will see the sign of the Blue Ball hung over the door.
“I dispose of my famous Orvietan, either liquid or in powder, what quantity or price you please. This is that Orvietan that expelled that vast quantity of poison I took before K. Charles II., for which his Majesty presented me with a gold medal and a chain.”
