282 FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, MEDICINE 
Dioscorides (De mat. med., ii. 20), the Scolopendra (ibid., ii. 16) ; 
or “ the brains of the Torpedo applied with alum on the sixteenth 
day of the moon !”’ 
Two more panaceas—needful and desirable now, as then— 
and I move to pastures new, or rather contiguous. The first : 
a mixture “of a live frog in a dog’s food” will, on Salpe’s 
authority, for ever deliver us from the yapping and barking 
which so often makes night hideous. 
The second—naivest and quaintest (if I may employ with- 
out cruelty these over-driven adjectives): ‘‘ Democritus 
assures us that if the tongue be extracted from a live frog, with 
no part of the body adhering to it, and it is then applied—the 
frog must first be placed in the water(!)—to a woman while 
asleep, just at the spot where the heart is felt to beat, she will 
of a certainty answer truthfully any question put to her!” 1 
If Hippocrates blamed his predecessors for their scanty 
use of drugs, he would scarcely, unless suddenly clothed with 
a shirt of credulity, have approved of the plethora of pre- 
scriptions and panaceas prevalent in later centuries. Truly 
applicable would then have been the inscription suggested for 
a pharmacy; “ Hic venditur galbanum, elaterium, opium, et 
omne quod in wm desinit, nisi remedium.”’ 2 
But credulity clogged such great minds as Hippocrates and 
Galen. Even they included astrology in the therapeutic art, 
and indict practitioners who only used that “ science ’’ despite- 
fully, or eschewed it, as “‘ men-killers.”’ 
Quite apart, however, from the recognised prose treatises 
by iatric writers such as Galen, Diphilus, and Xenocrates, 
there must have existed a very ample literature in Greek 
verse. One collection alone, Poete Bucolict et Didactict (Didot, 
Paris, 1872), reveals under the heading of Carminum Medicorum 
Reliquie the names of some dozen authors who deal chiefly— 
Marcellus Sidetes indeed exclusively—with the medicinal 
properties of fish. 
1 Pliny, XXXII.18. Belief in the efficacy of fish-nostrums continues 
unto this day: in the Middle Ages it permeated all classes, and all Europe, 
e.g. Charles IX. of France would never, if he could help it, drink unless a 
fragment of the tusk of the arwhal, or so-called sea-unicorn, were in the cup 
to counteract a possible poison, 
2 Badham, of. cit., 83. 
