In Egyptian hieroglyphics[156:3] Ra was represented as a hawk-headed man, holding in one hand the symbol of life, and in the other the royal sceptre.
The medical symbol ℞, still in use at the present day, owes its origin, however, neither to the angel Raphael nor to the god Ra. It is the ancient sign of Jupiter. This sign, which also symbolized the metal tin, had many modifications, some of which were as follows: [Z, ♃, Ψ].
These were gradually replaced by the letter R, or its astrological modification ℞, which was equivalent to Recipe, Jupiter,—Take, O Jupiter! We are told that the astrological signs were thus brought into use during Nero's reign, and that the practice of Medicine was then and afterwards regulated by the government. It is not improbable that Christian physicians were obliged to follow the example of their heathen professional brethren in prefixing to their prescriptions invocations to Jupiter.[157:1]
Johann Michael Moscherosch (1600-1669), a learned German writer, offered a unique explanation of the meaning of the medical symbol ℞, which he maintained to be equivalent to Rec, an abbreviation for per decem. And he explained the significance of the latter as being that one prescription out of ten might be expected to prove beneficial to the patient. It is certain, wrote Dr. Otto A. Wall, in his volume, "The Prescription," that pharmacies for the dispensing of medicines on physicians' prescriptions were already in existence at the ancient Spanish city of Cordova, and at other large municipalities under the control of the Arabs, previous to the twelfth century. And as early as 1233, pharmacy laws had already been passed in the Two Sicilies. By that time, it appears probable that medical prescriptions were no longer mere superstitious formulas, but that they contained directions for compounding material remedies having more or less medicinal virtues.
Modern medical prescriptions may be classed as lineal descendants of the healing-spells of former ages. In the most ancient known pharmacopœia, a papyrus discovered about the year 1858 in the Necropolis at Thebes, and believed to date from the sixteenth century b. c., no invocations or symbols are found, nor were the latter generally employed as prefixes to medical formulas prior to the first century a. d.; when their use appears to have originated among the Greeks and Romans, and the custom has continued until the present day. At the time of the alchemists, in the sixteenth century, "the influence of the Church on the minds of men, or perhaps the fear of the Inquisition, led physicians to adopt an invocation to the Christian God; just as they abbreviated a prayer to crossing themselves with their fingers over their foreheads and breasts, so they contracted the invocation to the sign of the cross as a superscription."[158:1]
Thus instead of the sign ℞ some physicians began their prescriptions with the Greek letters Α. Ω.; or the letters J. D. for Juvante Deo, C. D. for Cum Deo, or N. D. for Nomine Dei.
Dr. Rodney H. True, lecturer on botany at Harvard College, in a paper on Folk Materia Medica, read at a meeting of the Boston branch of the American Folk-Lore Society, February 19, 1901, gave a list of therapeutic agents, mostly of animal origin, forming the stock in trade of a European druggist some two hundred years ago. This list includes the fats, gall, blood, marrow from bones, teeth, livers, and lungs of various animals, birds, and reptiles; also bees, crabs, and toads, incinerated after drying; amber, shells, coral, claws, and horns; hair from deer and cats; ram's wool, partridge feathers, ants, lizards, leeches, earth-worms, pearl, musk, and honey; eyes of the wolf, pickerel, and crab; eggs of the hen and ostrich, cuttlefish bone, dried serpents, and the hoofs of animals.
With the development of materia medica in Europe, the use of animal drugs diminished; but during the last decade of the nineteenth century, extracts of animal organs were manufactured on a large scale, and found a ready market. Thus some of the articles mentioned are reckoned among remedial agents to-day, but most of them doubtless owed their virtues to mental action. Wolf's eyes in former times and bread pills nowadays may be cited as typical remedies, acting through the patient's imagination and possessing no intrinsic curative properties, yet nevertheless valuable articles of the pharmacopœia from the standpoint of suggestive therapeutics. In a list of Japanese quack medicines, of the present time, we find mention of "Spirit-cheering" pills.[159:1]
In "A Booke of Physicke and Chirurgery, with divers other things necessary to be knowne, collected out of sundry olde written bookes, and broughte into one order. Written in the year of our Lorde God 1610," among many curious prescriptions we find the following: "A good oyntment against the vanityes of the heade. Take the juice of worm woode and salte, honye, waxe and incens, and boyle them together over the fire, and therewith anoynte the sick heade and temples." The volume referred to was the property of Mr. William Pickering, an apparitor of the Consistory Court at Durham, England.
A commentator on the above prescription observed that few coxcombs, dandies, and heads filled with bitter conceits, would like to be anointed with this cure of self-sufficiency. The wax might make the plaster stick, but it might be feared that the honey and the incense would neutralize the good effects to be expected from the wormwood and salt. If, however, the phrase "vanityes of the head" be interpreted to mean a dearth of ideas, we may assume that the above prescription was intended as a stimulus to the imagination, and as such it might well have a therapeutic value.