206 NATURE AND LIFE. 



condition of the botanical and zoological knowledge of their 

 day, became the guide of experiments in healing, under the 

 influence of which the first books relating to substances 

 having medicinal qualities were written, among others the 

 treatises of Scribonius, Largus, and of Dioscorides. That 

 of Scribonius bears the title, " On the Composition of Medi- 

 cines." It is dedicated to a freedman of the Emperor 

 Claudius. The author had collected its materials in the 

 different campaigns in which he had been attached as army 

 physician to the Roman legions. Dioscorides also, who 

 lived under Nero, was connected with the army in the 

 capacity of a doctor, and collected in the countries he 

 traversed a great number of substances taken from the 

 three natural kingdoms. Returning to Rome, he made a 

 selection of those which seemed to him to possess some 

 efficacy in medicine, and described them in the Greek 

 language in an important book, which gives us the most 

 exact idea of the materia medica of the ancients, and which 

 continued to be a classic until the sixteenth century. This 

 book had the same vogue as those of Aristotle had ; but 

 we shall find that this kind of submissiveness to an ancient 

 master has not stood in the way of progress. 



Galen, the most learned and systematic among ancient 

 physicians, gives a new form and impulse to therapeutics. 

 Coming a little later than Dioscorides, he aimed to point 

 out the best use that could be made of the weapons col- 

 lected in the arsenal of pharmacy by the latter. The doc- 

 tor of Pergamus had faith in the need of prescribing many 

 remedies as firm as the conviction of Hippocrates that Na- 

 ture should be permitted to act almost by herself in dis- 

 eases. He substituted for the expectant methods the use 

 of an abundance of drugs, and suggested the invention of 

 those complicated mixtures known under the name of elec- 

 tuaries. Galenism is the origin of polypharmacy. It was 

 supposed, under the control of those notions to which this 



