534 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



earthworms, pearls, perspiration, saliva of a fasting man, scorpions, 

 raw silk, silkworm's cocoons, moss from the skull of a man who has 

 met a violent death, spermaceti, sponge, spider webs, cast off snake's 

 skin, sea shells, swallows' nests, suet, viper's flesh, wax and woodlice; 

 and along with these went those relics of the old Arabian polypharmacy, 

 the theriacs and mithridates, which consisted of grand mixtures of any- 

 thing and everything in the way of vegetable simples. In the seven- 

 teenth century there were actually "filth-pharmacopoeias" (Dreclc- 

 ApotheJcen) . The only physician of the time who did not attach much 

 importance to these remedies was the one who had the greatest fund 

 of practical sense, Thomas Sydenham. In the pharmacopoeias of 1721 

 and 1746, these nauseating remedies begin to disappear. One year 

 before the latter date, William Heberden, who was probably the greatest 

 English clinician between Sydenham and Bright, published his satirical 

 pamphlet " Antitheriaka " (1745), which was, in effect, a critical on- 

 slaught on polypharmacy. Charles Lever tells of a certain individual 

 who was " laughed out of Ireland." Heberden banished the theriacs 

 and mithridates from medicine with the scholar's ironical smile, and 

 with them went the filthier features of the materia medica. As a result 

 of this cool douche of common sense, the Pharmacopoeia of 1788 retains 

 but a single animal remedy — woodlice. Yet these things were the crude 

 elements of the present theory of treating certain diseases by means of 

 animal extracts. Before the time of Brown- Sequard, the only animal 

 extracts in our present pharmacopoeia were the antispasmodics, musk 

 and castoreum, which used to be described to gaping students, receiving 

 their first instruction in the action of drugs upon the human frame, as 

 derivatives of the preputial gland and follicles of the Tibetan musk deer 

 and the beaver, respectively. 



Another set of observations which bears upon our subject is that 

 connected with the universal interest in giants and dwarfs, the acro- 

 megalics and achondroplasics of modern pathology. The acromegalic 

 giants go back to the legendary lore of the Nephelim in Genesis (VI. 4), 

 of Og, king of Bashan, the Anakim, Goliath of Gath, the Titans, 

 Antaaus, Polyphemus, Fafner and Pasolt, Gog and Magog, down to the 

 huge images of Manchuria, the innumerable reports of excavations of 

 giant skeletal remains and the Irish, Chinese and Eussian giants of 

 more recent date. The achondroplasic dwarfs suggest the short-limbed 

 satyrs, the dwarf gods of Egypt (Bes, Phtah and others), 3 the black 

 pygmy races, 4 the court dwarfs and buffoons figured by Velasquez and 



3 For a full account of these, with many illustrations, see the Munich disser- 

 tation of Franz Ballod : ' ' Prolegomena zur Geschichte der zwerghaften Gotter in 

 Aegypten" (Moscow, 1913). 



4 There are no white races of pygmies, and it is probable that most white 

 dwarfs are myxoedematous or achondroplasic. 



