282 FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, MEDICINE 



Dioscorides {Demat. med., ii. 20), the Scolopendr a {ibid., ii. 16) ; 

 or " the brains of the Torpedo applied 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 Biicolici d Didadici (Didot, 

 Paris, 1872), reveals under the heading of Carminuin Medicorum 

 ReliquicB the names of some dozen authors who deal chiefly — 

 Marcellus Sidetes indeed exclusively — with the medicinal 

 properties of fish. 



1 Plin}-, XXXIl. 18. 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., 8j. 



