New remedies : with formulae for their preparation and administration / By Robley Dunglison.

  • Robley Dunglison
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: New remedies : with formulae for their preparation and administration / By Robley Dunglison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    ranarum or u water of frog's spawn was to !><■ found Dot very loi tlir I'harmacopu'iii of Sardinia.; and lh&aqua h irnml in n m <■<>,,, ,,,. /,,,-. ■, nr \va- tor of swallows with castor in those of .Manheim and W'irli ml» rg« The lat- ter preparation was directed t !><■ made as follows:—lake of young i wt bruised in a /n<,r/<rr, forty; rue, two handfuls; castor, one ounce; white wine, three pints. This disgusting preparation wa-given in hysteria and <-j.ii Again: the bufones exriccati or dried toads were in the Pharmacopmi Spain and AVirteniberg,—luiving been formerly administered in powder, diuretic, in dropsy. In another work,1 the author has cited manj as strange as those instanced, and it would be easy to enumerate still more. In a recent French journal, and in an article by M. Etieoxd—the distin- guished physician to the Venereal Hospital of Paris—v, have an example of the pertinacity with which ancient prepossessions and inculcations adhere to us, and how difficult it is to think and to act according to the unbiassed sugges- tions of our own observation and reflection. In the treatment of blennonha- gic epididymitis or swelled testicle from gonorrhoea, M. Ilicord recommends compression to be made by means of the sparadrap, or plaster of Vigo, with mercury. The history of the plaster of Vigo is singular. Although still in the Pharmacopoeia of Paris, it resembles its prototypes but in name. In the Pharmacopoeia of Wirtemberg, it is directed to be formed of living frogs and living earth-worms, boiled with various inert and by us rejected herbs in white wine vinegar,—the decoction being strained, and added to olive oil, litharge, oil of bayberrics, turpentine, yellow wax, olibanum, euphorbium, and liquid storax, all melted together. Yet it is scarcely possible to conceive, that the frog's spawn could have been supposed to yield a product on distillation differing from that of other animal substances when subjected to the same process; that the swallows—in the preparation cited—added any thing to the antispasmodic virtues of the castor, or that the living frogs and earth-worms exerted any efficacy in the sparadrap de Vigo—a plaster employed for compressing tumours, and for which purpose we use one of simple adhesive constituents. They have all been properly re- jected from the lists of our medicinal agents, and are looked upon as irrational; yet we are compelled to infer, from the fact of their having been received, in some countries, into officinal publications—into the pharmacopoeias, which emanate from congregations of those of our profession, who are esteemed learned by education and by practice—that they were originally admitted under the sanction of fancied experience. In the darker periods of medical history, monstrous and revolting polyphar- macal preparations were introduced, and nothing but the blindest devotion to authority or to established custom could have occasioned their retention. It is not long since the Theriac of Andromachus—itself but a modification of the Antidoturn Mithridatum—was dismissed from the British pharmacopoeias. It consisted of seventy-two articles, and was a farrago—as Dr. Ilebcrden observed 1 General Therapeutics, p. 55. Philad. 1886. [See, also, his General Therapeutics and Mat. Medica, 6th edit. i. GG. Thilad. 1853.]