VOLATILE OILS. 39 



^tius, of Amida, a physician and writer, who Hved 

 in Constantinople during the beginning of the sixth cen- 

 tiiry, wrote a treatise on the distilling of empyreumatic 

 (volatile) oils. Rose water was used by the Arabians 

 in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries as an eye-wash, 

 and rose oil sugar was employed much as we employ 

 turpentine on a lump of sugar for intestinal flatus by 

 the physicians of the Caliph of Monacco in the tenth 

 centur\'. Indeed* rose oil and camphor were current 

 remedies throughout these times. The use of alcohol to 

 extract the volatile oils was taken up in the beginning 

 of the fourteenth century, and distilled aromatic waters 

 and alcoholic solutions of aromatics were very widely 

 employed in medicine. The alchemistic chemical litera- 

 ture of the Middle Ages is filled with the discoveries of the 

 various volatile oils that could be extracted from plants. 



It is of interest to note that one of the greatest of all 

 ** quacks," as judged by modern standards, Paracelsus 

 ( 1 493-1 541), was the real founder of a school that taught 

 that it was the chemical substance within a drug that 

 was the real agent of value and not the whole drug 

 (latro-chemical school), an idea that was pregnant with 

 larg^-results. 



The modem era of knowledge concerning volatile oils 

 may be said to have begun with the analysis of the 

 stearoptens by Dumas in 1833, and following him a host 

 of chemists have cleared up the chemical composition 

 of a number of important series of compounds, although 

 there are yet many unknown factors in their construc- 

 tion. Hoffman,- an authority, says that the chemistry 

 of the volatile oils is but in its initial stages, and who will 

 dare say that their pharmacology is by any means 

 clearly understood? It is not many years since menthol 

 was introduced into medicine, and it is but a forerunner 

 of a large class of similar bodies whose limitation of 

 action must first be studied. 



