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general, in forty-two books. Damocrates favoured the world 

 with a poetical eflfusion on the humble subject of a kind of 

 diachylon plaster : he gave all his prescriptions in iambics. 

 Andromachus, physician to Nero, dedicated to his royal 

 master a poem descriptive of the celebrated confection which 

 went under his name, although really invented by King 

 Mithridates. This practice was not confined to the Romans ; 

 the Indian philosopher, Shehab Addeen, whose era is un- 

 known, wrote a poem on pharmacy, in three hundred stanzas 

 of Tamul verse, the poetry of which, Ainslie says, is much 

 esteemed. Such poems were not uncommon amongst Oriental 

 writers. 



" The regularly educated physicians of antiquity, far from 

 being slaves, were the friends and associates of persons of the 

 most exalted rank in all civilized countries. Avicenna Avas 

 physician and grand vizier to the Siiltan Magdal Doulet, and 

 the companion of princes and nobles. Mesne was the fourth 

 in descent from Abdela, king of Damascus. Menecrates of 

 Syracuse was physician and friend of Philip of Macedon. De- 

 mocedes of Crotona, the founder of the reputation of the 

 faculty of Crotona, was the medical adviser and constant guest 

 at the table of Darius the great. 



" Crowned heads did not think the study of medicine 

 beneath them. Kiag Solomon was well versed in medical 

 botany ; his ' History of Plants' is said to have been burned in 

 the hbrary of Alexandria. King Antiochus invented an anti- 

 dote to all sorts of poison, the composition of which was en- 

 graved on a stone at the entrance to the temple of Esculapius. 

 Attains, the last king of Pergamus, invented several useful 

 formula, which have descended to us. Mithridates, king of 

 Pont us, as already stated, invented the celebrated confection. 

 Juba, the second king of Mauritania, Avrote a book on the 

 virtues of herbs ; so also did Evax, a king of Arabia, Avhich 

 he dedicated to Nero. Nero himself dabbled a little in medi- 

 cine. The imperial reprobate, during his noctm-nal wander- 



