EERLICH'S SPECIFIC THERAPEUTICS 217 



heat, light, electricity, hydrotherapy, climate, dietetics, hypnotism and 

 psj^chotherapy, out-door exercise and simple living, the physician has 

 many strings to his bow, apart from the more special arms of treatment 

 like operative surgery, ophthalmology, orthopaedics, etc. In respect 

 of drugs, it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that scarcely more than 

 a double baker's dozen are strictly reliable. Even the average prac- 

 titioner of to-day will admit that in regard to general treatment 

 of disease with drugs we are almost where we were over 2,000 years 

 ago. Among the greater Greeks, the divine Hippocrates created surg- 

 ical diagnosis and taught physicians how to group symptoms and 

 to describe different diseases; Theophrastus Eresius, the friend and 

 pupil of Aristotle, was the founder of scientific botany; Dioscorides 

 made the first materia medica and Galen, the father of the experi- 

 mental idea, taught the Eomans how to apply it. Of the two great 

 founders of European medicine, Galen was the abler and keener thera- 

 pist, but inclined to brag about his cures. Hippocrates, who told of his 

 failures also, was the truer clinician. The complicated and elaborate 

 polypharmacy which Galen imposed upon medicine was exaggerated 

 into the most filthy extremes during the Byzantine period and was 

 further enlarged by the superior chemical knowledge of the Saracens. 

 To this day, what Osier calls " the heavy hand of the Arabian " is 

 sensed in the enormous bulk of our pharmacopoeias. After the Eevival 

 of Learning and during the Eenaissance period, the chief concern of 

 medicine was the development of anatomy and surgery, and while a few 

 original spirits like Saliceto, Mondeville and John of Arderne were good 

 healers, yet down through the eighteenth century, treatment was 

 largely an affair of lengthy " gunshot prescriptions," compounded of 

 multifarious ingredients on the hit-or-miss principle, well-deserving of 

 Mark Twain's comment " serve with a shovel." The tendencies of this 

 picturesque therapy, founded upon the "doctrine of signatures," have 

 been very prettily rhymed in the envoy to Kipling's recent story about 

 old Nicholas Culpeper, the most famous of the seventeenth century 

 quacksalvers, herb-doctors and " judicial astrologers " : 



Excellent herbs had our fathers of old — 



Excellent herbs to ease their pain — 

 Alexanders and Marigold, 



Eyebright, Orris and Elecampane, 

 Basil, Rocket, Valerian, Rue, 



(Almost singing themselves they run), 

 Vervain, Dittany, Call-me-to-you — 



Cowslip, Melilot, Rose of the Sun. 

 Anything green that grew out of the mould 



Was an excellent herb to our fathers of old 



Wonderful little when all is said, 



Wonderful little our fathers knew, 

 Half their remedies cured you dead — 



