BERBERIDEÆ.
CORTEX BERBERIDIS INDICUS.
Indian Barberry Bark.
Botanical Origin—This drug is allowed in the Pharmacopœia of India to be taken indifferently from three Indian species of Berberis[153] which are the following:—
1. Berberis aristata DC., a variable species occurring in the temperate regions of the Himalaya at 6000 to 10,000 feet elevation, also found in the Nilgiri mountains and Ceylon.[154]
2. B. Lycium, Royle, an erect, rigid shrub found in dry, hot situations of the western part of the Himalaya range at 3000 to 9000 feet above the sea-level.
3. B. asiatica Roxb.—This species has a wider distribution than the last, being found in the dry valleys of Bhutan and Nepal whence it stretches westward along the Himalaya to Garhwal, and occurs again in Afghanistan.
History—The medical practitioners of ancient Greece and Italy made use of a substance called Lycium, (λύκιον) of which the best kind was brought from India. It was regarded as a remedy of great value in restraining inflammatory and other discharges; but of all the uses to which it was applied the most important was the treatment of various forms of ophthalmic inflammation.
Lycium is mentioned by Dioscorides, Pliny, Celsus, Galen, and Scribonius Largus; by such later Greek writers as Paulus Ægineta, Ætius, and Oribasius, as well as by the Arabian physicians.
The author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea who probably lived in the 1st century, enumerates λύκιον as one of the exports of Barbarike at the mouth of the Indus, and also names it along with Bdellium and Costus among the commodities brought to Barygaza:—and further, lycium is mentioned among the Indian drugs on which duty was levied at the Roman custom-house of Alexandria about a.d. 176-180.[155]