Gray's supplement to the Pharmacopoeia : being a concise but comprehensive dispensatory and manual of facts and formulae, for the chemist and druggist and medical practitioner / by Theophilus Redwood.

  • Samuel Frederick Gray
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gray's supplement to the Pharmacopoeia : being a concise but comprehensive dispensatory and manual of facts and formulae, for the chemist and druggist and medical practitioner / by Theophilus Redwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    to tliis law, every medical man was required to give information against any pharmaceutist who should sell bad medicines. The phar- maceutists were divided into two classes: 1st, the Stationarii, who sold simple medicines, and non magistral preparations, according to a tariff settled by competent authorities; 2ndly, the Confectionarii, whose business consisted in scrupulously dispensing the prescriptions of the medical men. All these pharmaceutical establishments were placed under the surveillance of a College of Medicine.* During the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, apothe- caries' shops, or dispensaries, were established in most of the large cities in France and Germany; and these, in the first instance, were often fitted up and supported at the public expense. A garden was also, in these cases, often appropriated to the apothecary, for the culti- vation of such indigenous plants as he required. In 1345, King Edward III. gave a pension of sixpence a day to Coursus de Gangland, an apothecary in London, for taking care of, and attending, his Majesty during his illness hi Scotland. But it is probable that apothecaries were not common in England at this period. We are informed by Saladin, a writer of the fifteenth century, that at that time the only books referred to by the apothecaries, as autho- rities with reference to the preparation of medicines, were, the works of Avicenna; the treatise on Simple and Compound Medicines, by Serapion ; a treatise on Synonemes, and the Quid pro Quo on Substi- tutes, by Simon; the Liber Servatoris of Bulchasin Ben Aberazerin, treating of the preparation of plants and animals, and the chemical remedies then in use; the Antidotarium of Johannes Damascenus, or Mesue; and the Antidotarium of Nicolaus de Salerno. The last-named author, who was director of the school at Salernum, a city in the kingdom of Naples, lived about the middle of the twelfth century. In his Antidotarium, or Isagogica introductio in artem Apothecariatus, he described a great number of medicines, principally taken from the Arabs. He must not be confounded, as he has been by some writers, with Nicolas Prevost, called Propositus,' of Tours, whose Dispensatory was published in 1488, and subsequent editions of it in 1505, 1564, and 1582. This work is considered to have been the first of the kind circulated in Europe. Many of the remedies introduced into medicine about this period, owed their origin to the investigations of the alchemists, who were engaged in the futile endeavour to discover the philosopher's stone, and the universal remedy for all diseases of the body. Raymond Lully, of Majorca, was one of the principal writers of this school. He was born in the year 1235, and died in Africa in 1315. He is said to have written about sixty volumes on subjects connected with chemistry. Among these were his works, de Lapide Aurifico; de Quinta Essentia; de Accurtatioiie Lapidis PMlosophorum; Lux Mercuriorum, &c. Basil Valentine, born in 1394, contributed greatly by his writings to the introduction of chemical remedies in the practice of medicine. * Constituliones Neapolitaiiaj ct Sicuks liii. tit. xxxiv. 1, Q, apiul Liudeiiborg., Cod. legum autifjuaiiim; Fiaucf., 10]3, in fol.
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