48 FIELDING H. GAKKISON 



urine of all manner of animals; also bee glue, civet, cock's comb, coral, 

 crayfish, earlfcworms, pearls, perspiration, saliva of a fasting man, scor- 

 pions, raw silk, silkworm's cocoons, moss from the skull of a man who 

 has met a violent death, spermaceti, sponge, spider webs, cast off snake's 

 skin, sea shells, swallows' nests, suet, viper's flesh, wax, and wood-lice; 

 and along with these went those relics of the old Arabian polypharmacy, 

 the theriacs and mithridates, which consisted of grand mixtures of any- 

 thing and everything in the way of vegetable simples. In the seventeenth 

 century there were actually "filth pharmacopeias" (Dreckapotheken) . 



The only physician of the time who did not attach much importance 

 to these remedies was the one who had the greatest fund of practical sense, 

 Thomas Sydenham. In the Pharmacopeias of 1721 and 1746 these 

 nauseating remedies begin to disappear. One year before, the latter date 

 William Heberden, who was probably the greatest English clinician be- 

 tween Sydenham and Bright, published his satirical pamphlet "Anti- 

 theriaka" (1745), which was, in effect^ a critical onslaught on polyphar- 

 macy. Heberden banished the theriacs and mithridates from medicine 

 with the scholar's ironical smile, and with them went the filthier features 

 of the materia medica. As a result of this cool douche of common 

 sense, the Pharmacopeia of 1788 retains but a single animal remedy 

 wood-lice. 



Now, while these things were the crude elements of the present day 

 organotherapy, the theory upon which their employment was based was, 

 in no sense, isotherapy or similia similibus, but simply the superstition of 

 homeopathic or sympathetic magic (Frazer), as exemplified in such 

 phases as the chthonian cult of the ancient Greeks or the medieval doc- 

 trine of signatures. In the ritual of the chthonian gods, or gods of the 

 underworld, and the archaic pathology and neurology deriving from it, 

 there existed, in the pre-Hippocratic period, a sacred pharmacopeia of 

 animal and vegetable substances, sometimes the rejects of sacrifice (cafhr 

 annata), and each drug ((frapnaKov) , in its function of averting, aborting, 

 01- driving out disease from the body, became a sacrificial scapegoat 

 ( 4>apna.K6s ) , or substitute for the angered god, in the apotropaic, hilastic, 

 and cathartic rites rendered to him. Here the viscera employed as reme- 

 dies were not even identical with those affected by disease, but were used 

 at haphazard, according to the tenets of a complex cult; e.g., the heart of 

 autumnal was employed in various diseases, but never in heart disease, the 

 existence of which was even denied in some of the ancient writings. Ac- 

 cording to the medieval doctrine of signatures or similars, diseases or dis- 

 eased organs were benefited by tilings similar to them; e.g., jaundice by 

 the sight of a yellow bird, diseased lungs by the lungs of foxes, ear disease 

 by the leaves of cyclamen, etc. ; or, as Paracelsus put it, "heart cures heart, 

 spleen spleen, lungs lungs." All this was abolished from therapy by 

 Heberden'a memorable exegesis. Before the time of Brown-Sequard, the 



