Exhibiting bottles containing actual medicines is doubtless a much more ancient practice than that of exhibiting them for the sake of their own showiness or that of the solutions placed therein. That has, in all probability, been customary from the time when dealing in drugs began. When was that?
It is known that the art of the pharmacist and trading in drugs were practiced at an early period in Egypt. Thus, in the “Papyrus-Ebers,” which was written 1600 years before our era, we learn that for most diseases remedies were prescribed, drawn from all three kingdoms of nature, and in some instances were brought from distant lands. The prescriptions, I may add, were compounded according to exact weights and measures. Two recipes for pills are given: one with honey for women, and one without it for men. One for the preparation of a hair-dye, ascribed to the mother-in-law[510] of the first king of Egypt is given, which Ebers states[511] to be the earliest of all recipes preserved to us, the date of its origin being about 4000 B.C.
I could give many Egyptian and other ancient references to fancy vessels of glass and other materials used in the pursuit of ministering to the sick. One extremely interesting direct reference to the use of medicinal vases at a very early date has recently been brought to the attention of the public. I refer to a translation of an Assyrian fragment made by Mr. J. Halevy, given in “The Records of the Past.”[512] It is so interesting from several points of view that I will give it here in its entirety:—
“For the eruptions and humors which afflict the body:
Fill a vase which has held drugs with water from an inexhaustible well;
Put in it a shoot of ⸺ a ⸺ reed, some date-sugar, some urine, some bitter hydromel
Add to it some ⸺;
Saturate it with pure water [and]
Pour upon it the water of the [sick] man.