300 



THE ACTION OF DRUGS 



quaries there is a manuscript account in Latin, by 

 Dr Scarbrugh, how the case was treated. The 

 King had sixteen physicians, and nine consulta- 

 tions in five days; and to say 4 'everything was 

 done that was possible " gives no idea of the vigour 

 of the treatment. Finally, the day he died, they 

 gave him, eleven of them in consultation — totus 

 medicorum chorus ab omni spe destitutus — they gave 

 him, as more generous cardiacs, the lapis Goce, and 

 the Bezoar-stone. The lapis Goce was a dust of 

 topaz, jacinth, sapphire, ruby, pearl, emerald, 

 bezoar, coral, musk, ambergris, and gold, all 

 made into a pill and polished ; and the bezoar is 

 a calculus found in the intestines of herbivorous 

 animals. Half a century later, the Pharma- 

 copoeia of 1 72 1 still included ants' eggs, teeth, 

 lapis nephriticus, and other horrors ; and in the 

 Pharmacopoeia of 1746, though the dust of 

 Egyptian mummies was ruled out, vipers and 

 wood-lice were retained. 



Certainly these "last enchantments of the 

 Middle Ages " were slow to depart. Clinical 

 observation, anatomy, and pathology, had all 

 failed to bring about a right understanding of 

 the actions of drugs. It was the physiologists, 

 not the doctors, who first formulated the exact 

 use of drugs ; it was Bichat, Magendie, and 

 Claude Bernard. That is the whole meaning of 

 Magendie's work on the upas - poison and on 

 strychnine, and Claude Bernard's work on curari 

 and digitalis. Of these four substances, two only 

 are of any use in practice ; yet Magendie's study 



