HISTORY 3 



served for many centuries as an inexhaustible source of information. 

 This remarkable work contains classified descriptions of a great 

 number of vegetable, animal, and mineral drugs, no fewer than 500 

 medicinal plants, including many exotic ones, being discussed. To 

 Dioscorides belongs the credit of being the first to separate phar- 

 macognosy from medicine. 



Pliny, who lived about the same time as Dioscorides and evidently 

 made use to some extent of the same sources of information, studied 

 natural history ; his work on this subject consisted of forty-seven 

 books, many of which have been unfortunately lost, Pliny himself 

 perishing in the eruption of Vesuvius (A.D. 79). His ' Natural History,' 

 in addition to books dealing with zoology, meteorology, astrology, 

 &c., treats of as many as 1,000 plants. 



Galen (A.D. 131 to 200) was a physician and studied chiefly the 

 production of various ' galenical ' preparations, dealing only inci- 

 dentally with drugs. He recognised the adulteration of cinnamon, 

 pepper, saffron, and myrrh, and points out that exhausted rhubarb 

 was sold in place of the genuine. He wrote twenty books containing 

 a large number of receipts for various preparations. 



With the subsequent decline of the Roman Empire, a long period 

 of scientific inactivity, or perhaps rather retrogression, took place. 

 The Arabian Empire then rose, and seats of learning were established 

 and encouraged at Bagdad, Cordova, Toledo, &c. The Arabians 

 acted chiefly as the transmitters of Greek and Roman knowledge, 

 adding comparatively little of their own. The most important of 

 their writers were Geber, Rhazes, Avicenna, and Ibn Baitar. 



Geber (A.D. 850 ?), who studied at Cordova, wrote chiefly concern- 

 ing salts of which a considerable number were known to him. 



Rhazes (A.D. 875 ?) studied medicine in Bagdad, and with him a 

 period of independent investigation began. He was acquainted with 

 asafetida, aloes, dandelion, henbane, stavesacre, and numerous other 

 drugs ; he prepared extracts by evaporating infusions and made 

 them into pills, which he coated with psyllium mucilage in order to 

 render them less unpleasant to take. 



Avicenna (A.D. 980) was perhaps the most gifted of the Arabian 

 physicians and a very prolific writer. His ' Canon Medicinae ' served 

 as the chief source of medical knowledge down to the fifteenth 

 century. 



Ibn Baitar (A.D. 1197-1248) devoted himself chiefly to botanical 

 work in which he excelled, his ' Corpus Simplicium Medicamentorum,' 

 containing descriptions of about 2,000 drugs, of which 1,700 were of 

 vegetable origin. 



The Arabian school was followed by that of Salerno, near Naples, 

 where a school of medicine, established in the twelfth century or 

 possibly earlier, was instrumental in continuing scientific work until 

 the dawn of science in Europe in the fifteenth century. During this 



