282 FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, MEDICINE 



Dioscorides [Demat. med., ii. 20), the Scolopendra {ibid., ii. 16) ; 

 or " the brains of the Torpedo apphed with alum on the sixteenth 

 day of the moon ! " 



Two more panaceas — needful and desirable now, as then — 

 and I move to pastures new, or rather contiguous. The first : 

 a mixture " of a live frog in a dog's food " will, on Salpe's 

 authority, for ever deliver us from the yapping and barking 

 which so often makes night hideous. 



The second — naivest and quaintest (if I may employ with- 

 out cruelty these over-driven adjectives) : " Democritus 

 assures us that if the tongue be extracted from a live frog, with 

 no part of the body adhering to it, and it is then applied — the 

 frog must first be placed in the water (!) — to a woman while 

 asleep, just at the spot where the heart is felt to beat, she will 

 of a certainty answer truthfully any question put to her ! " 1 



If Hippocrates blamed his predecessors for their scanty 

 use of drugs, he would scarcely, unless suddenly clothed with 

 a shirt of credulity, have approved of the plethora of pre- 

 scriptions and panaceas prevalent in later centuries. Truly 

 applicable would then have been the inscription suggested for 

 a pharmacy ; " Hie venditur galbanum, elaterium, opium, et 

 omne quod in um desinit, nisi remedium." 2 



But credulity clogged such great minds as Hippocrates and 

 Galen. Even they included astrology in the therapeutic art, 

 and indict practitioners who only used that " science " despite- 

 fully, or eschewed it, as " men-killers." 



Quite apart, however, from the recognised prose treatises 

 by iatric writers such as Galen, Diphilus, and Xenocrates, 

 there must have existed a very ample literature in Greek 

 verse. One collection alone, Poetce Bucolici et Didactici (Didot, 

 Paris, 1872), reveals under the heading of Carminum Mediconim 

 Reliquice the names of some dozen authors who deal chiefly — 

 Marcellus Sidetes indeed exclusively — with the medicinal 

 properties of fish. 



1 Pliny, XXXII. i8. Belief in the efficacy of fish-nostrums continues 

 unto this day : in the Middle Ages it permeated all classes, and all Europe, 

 e.g. Charles IX. of France would never, if he could help it, drink unless a 

 fragment of the tusk of the narwhal, or so-called sea-unicorn, were in the cup 

 to counteract a possible poison. 



* Badham, op. cit., S3. 



