“Xenocrates, who flourished sixty years before Galen, had also a good list of nasty prescriptions, for which the veil of a dead language is required.” (“Saxon Leechdoms,” lib. i. p. xviii.) These included the urine of women and their catamenia.
Aristophanes called the physicians of his time σκατοφάγους, or excrement-eaters. “Ce qui était plus malin que vrai, car les compères en faisaient manger à leurs clients plus qu’ils n’en mangeaient eux-mêmes.”—(“Bibliotheca Scatalogica.”)
Human excrements, under the name of “botryon,” were used by Æschines of Athens, for the cure of quinsy. (Pliny, lib. xxviii. c. 10.) Æschines lived between 389-317 B.C.
“Serapion of Alexandria flourished B.C. 278, forty years after the date of Alexander the Great, and was one of the chiefs of the empiric school.... He in epilepsy prescribed ... dung of crocodiles.”—(“Saxon Leechdoms,” vol. i. p. xiv.)
The next in chronological order would be Pliny, from whom can be extracted a veritable mine of information on this point; then Dioscorides, who lived in the latter years of the first and the opening ones of the second centuries of the Christian era; and then Galen, born at Pergamos, in Mysia, 130 A.D., “the most celebrated of ancient medical writers,” and “appointed by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to the position of medical guardian of his son, the young prince, and later on Emperor, Commodus.”—(Encyc. Brit.)
The classical authorities will conclude with Sextus Placitus, from whose works much of importance has been extracted.
Each author will be allowed to speak in his own words, and the necessary deductions will be made afterwards; only the remarks bearing upon love-philters and child-birth have been assigned to the chapters devoted to the treatment of those subjects, and this merely to reduce the chances of repetition.
The following remedies are taken from Pliny, from the books and chapters given opposite each case:—
“A plant that has been grown upon a dung-heap in a field is a very efficacious remedy, taken in water, for quinsy.”—(Lib. xxiv. c. 110.)
“A plant upon which a dog has watered, torn up by the roots, and not touched with iron, is a very speedy cure for sprains.”—(Idem, c. 111.)