531 



ings through the streets of Rome, used to get involved in 

 pugilistic contests, and would then return home with one or 

 two black eyes, and a fiice of aU colours. He compounded 

 for himself an ointment consisting of deadly carrot, frankin- 

 cense, and wax, with which he smeared his face, and next 

 morning was free from all evidence of the fistic dexterity of 

 his subjects. Agrippa, king of the Jews, invented an omt- 

 ment for debility of the nerves, which incumbered the phar- 

 macopoeias of Europe until a few centuries ago. The emperor 

 Adrian possessed considerable knowledge of medicines and 

 pharmacy ; he invented an antidote against all sorts of poisons. 

 The emperor Justin dictated a formula which continued in 

 use for a thousand years. 



" The prophet Esdras, while in exile at Babylon, com- 

 posed a medicine which consisted of no less than one hundred 

 and fifty ingredients, and one of these contained forty others. 

 It would have shortened the prescription had he ordered a 

 little of all the known medicines in the world to be mixed. 

 This compound was in medical use untU a few centuries since. 

 St. Paul was also the inventor of a formula which has been 

 preserved by Nicolaus Praepositus. 



" Until the days of Hippocrates medicine was studied as 

 a branch of philosophy. According to ^lian, the Pytha- 

 goreans not only studied medicine but practised it; so also, 

 says the same authority, did Plato and Aristotle. Pythagoras 

 gave a tolerably good formida for certain stomach complaints. 

 Democritus, retm'ning from his travels, wrote a book, in 

 which he gave a presciiption to enable parents to have hand- 

 some, virtuous, and fortunate children : miserably for the vo- 

 taries of beauty and worth, the prescription is lost. Chry- 

 sippus and Dienchus each wrote a book on the virtues of wUd 

 cabbage. Hippocrates dissevered the connexion between 

 philosophy and medicine, and from his time the latter began 

 to be studied as a separate art. ' Ubi desinit physicus incipit 

 medicus,' says Aristotle. Eminent persons still, however, 



