Apis. (The Bee.) 



(FORMERLY SPELLED APES). 



History and Uses of Bees. — Bees have been used in medicine 

 from the day of Galen. PHny and other writers of the olden time 

 disported at some length on the therapeutic use of the bee in sub- 

 stance and in compounds. Mouffet, 1658, in whose day insects and 

 such were favorites in medicine, makes reference, as follows, to former 

 authorities, and to the field of therapeutic usefulness the bee was then 

 presumed to occupy. 



The Use of Bees in Medicine. — First of all, their bodies as soon as they 

 are taken out of the hive, and pounded and drank with some diuretic, or 

 wine and milk, do strongly cure the dropsie, dissolve the stone or gravel, 

 open all the passages of the urine, cure the stopping of the bladder. Bees 

 that die in the honey cure impostumes, and help the dullness of sight or 

 hearing. Also, being pounded together they cure the griping or wringing 

 of the belly or guts, being applied to them. If poisoned honey be drank, 

 they themselves being drank down after it, do expell it; they soften hard 

 ulcers in the lips; being bound to a carbuncle or running sore, they heal it; 

 they cure the bloody fiux. Honejf being strained with them helps the crudi- 

 ties of the stomach, or specks or red pimples in the face, as you may see in 

 Hollerius, Alexander Bened, and especially in Pliny. Take bees dead in the 

 combs, and when they are thoroughly dry make them into powder, as Galen 

 in Euporist writes, mingle them with the honey in which they died, and 

 anoint the parts of the head that are bald and thin haired, and you shall 

 see them grow again. Pliny in like manner teaches to burn a great com- 

 pany of bees together and mingle the ashes with oil, and anoint the part, 

 only with this caution, that the adjacent parts be not touched therewith; 

 yea, honey scraped ofif bees that are dead, he affirms to be very sovereign in 

 all diseases, and very useful. Erotis in his 61 chap, de Morh. mulieb., tells 

 us that their ashes beaten with oil is good to make the hair white. — Mouffet, 

 Theater of Insects, 1658, p. go6. 



From this date, until revived in Homeopathy, Apis became grad- 

 ually less important until (as shown later) Dr. John M. Scudder 

 (1874) revived interest in it as a specific remedy in his teachings. 

 The history of its record (after Mouffet) may be condensed, as fol- 

 ows: 



In the chapter on Insects in Medicinal Use, The New London 

 Dispensatory, Salmon, 1682, devotes two pages to Apis, together with 

 its products, Honey and Wax, writing as follows about the insect : 



The Bee. i. The Whole Bee in Powder, given inwardly, provoke 

 Urine, opens all stoppages of the Reins, and break the stone; they are good 

 against Cancers, Schirrous Tumors, the King's Evil, Dropsie, dimness of 



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