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general, in forty-two books. Damocrates favoured the world 

 with a poetical effusion on the humble subject of a kind of 

 diachylon plaster : he gave all his prescriptions in iambics. 

 Andromachus, physician to Nero, dedicated to his royal 

 master a poem descriptive of the celebrated confection which 

 went imder his name, although really invented by King 

 Mithridates. This practice was not confined to the Romans ; 

 the Indian philosopher, Shehab Addeen, whose era is un- 

 known, wrote a poem on pharmacy, in three hundred stanzas 

 of Tamul verse, the poetry of which, Ainslie says, is much 

 esteemed. Such poems were not uncommon amongst Oriental 

 writers. 



" The regularly educated physicians of antiquity, far from 

 being slaves, were the friends and associates of persons of the 

 most exalted rank in all civilized countries. Avicenna was 

 physician and grand vizier to the Sultan Magdal Doulet, and 

 the companion of princes and nobles. Mesne was the fourth 

 in descent from Abdela, king of Damascus. Menecrates of 

 Syracuse was physician and friend of Philip of Macedon. De- 

 mocedes of Crotona, the founder of the reputation of the 

 faculty of Crotona, was the medical adviser and constant guest 

 at the table of Darius the gi-eat. 



" Crowned heads did not think the study of medicine 

 beneath them. King Solomon was well versed in medical 

 botany ; his ' History of Plants' is said to have been burned in 

 the library of Alexandria. King Antiochus invented an anti- 

 dote to all sorts of poison, the composition of which was en- 

 graved on a stone at the entrance to the temple of Esculapius. 

 Attains, the last king of Pergamus, invented several useful 

 formulae, which have descended to us. Mithridates, king of 

 Pontus, as already stated, invented the celebrated confection. 

 Juba, the second king of ISIaurltania, -wrote a book on the 

 virtues of herbs ; so also did Evax, a king of Arabia, which 

 he dedicated to Nero. Nero liimself dabbled a little in medi- 

 cine. The imperial reprobate, during his nocturnal wander- 



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