ALOES. 
107 
up by the Jewish and Arabian students and imitators of the Greek medical classics. 
The Arabians, in turn, were drawn upon by the medical writers of western Europe, 
when printing had been invented, and physical science awoke from the dust. The great 
authority John Mesue, of Damascus, whose works were the source of all pharmaceutical 
lore in the sixteenth century, and who was, so to say, the lineal ancestor of all Pharma* 
copoeias down to the British, gives aloes, if possible, a higher character than his Greek 
predecessors. The maxim found in Dioscorides, and in some editions of Celsus, was en¬ 
forced—that aloes was so congenial to the stomach, that it ought to be mixed with all 
purgatives. And we soon find the acutest physicians of the day writing monographs on 
aloes, in which they recognize it not as a mere purge, but as a preserver of health by 
keeping the intestines in their normal activity. Curious is it, as a sign of the leisurely, 
dreamy, bookworm state of mind in the early part of the seventeenth century, to find 
monographs, respectable treatises in their size, written to describe and recommend some 
one preparation of aloes. Such a work is the ‘ Aloedarium ’ of the great Raymund 
Minderer, of Augsburg, once the most accomplished scholar and physician to the most 
serene Duke of Bavaria, and to the noble family of the Fuggers—a man whose pre¬ 
scriptions were copied by the physicians of the whole world. Now, his name is for¬ 
gotten by those who prescribe his febrifuge, the liquor ammonise acetatis; it is heard 
only in the mouths of the vulgar, who ask at a chemist’s for “ spirit of Mindererus ” for 
a cold in the head ; but whether Mindererus was a man, or a beast, or a stone, they wot 
not. Sic transit gloria medici. 
This ‘ Aloedarium ’ of Minderer, dated at Augsburg in 1622, contains in 270 duode¬ 
cimo pages, a most elaborate account of his pet compound of aloes with spices and 
aromatic gums, and of all that ever was said by authors, sacred and profane, about each 
of the ingredients separately. The components were three ounces of aloes, three scruples 
each of marum and of saffron, three half-drachms of agaric, costus, and myrrh, three 
drachms of ammoniacum, three times two drachms of rhubarb, and three half-scruples 
of lign. aloes. Each of these fancifully proportioned ingredients was separately mace¬ 
rated in a separate and supposed appropriate liquid—for instance, the aloes in rose water, 
the myrrh in rue vinegar—so that no less than twenty liquids were employed in con¬ 
cocting the nine solids into what, no doubt, was a very useful predecessor of our com¬ 
pound rhubarb pill. What is noteworthy and practical about Minderer is, that he 
recommends his compounds in what, for the age, were small doses—that is, from ten 
grains down to two or three; that he advises it to be taken often for the preservation of 
health, and not (by itself) as a purge in sickness, and that he specifies the class of 
people who should take it: not the lean, dark, and nervous, but the big, flaxen Saxon 
populations who ate plenty of fat meat, and washed it down with daily draughts of fat 
ale. 
A few years later we meet with another monograph, the ‘ Aloe Morbifuga,’ published 
at Antwerp in 1633, by Dr. William Marcquis, sworn physician of that city. It is a 
curious thing that all the literary and medical part of this work is a direct copy-—theft, 
we suppose we may say—from Minderer; not merely the ideas, but the words are 
borrowed. Yet, in one respect, it shows great progress. For, lo ! the author apologe¬ 
tically prescribes the drug in its native simplicity, without the usual bombastic parade of 
heterogeneous admixture. Nay, more; Marcquis is, we believe, the father of the watery 
extract of aloes. Surely they err, he says, who wash their aloes with repeated onpour- 
ings of rain-water, till they get a clean, dry, tasteless residue ; for they wash away the 
valuable part, and leave the dregs. But although he gives a formula for the watery 
extract, he does not like to throw away all the insoluble portion, whose astringency he 
thinks of some value. 
Already, in the time of Minderer and Marcquis, we find the West Indies enumerated 
amongst the places from which aloes was brought to Europe, and from that time to the 
present the account of its varieties and properties has been handed down from one 
writer on drugs to another with little intrinsic variation. We are usually taught to 
recognize four varieties as regards physical condition. First, the semi-transparent, 
brittle, of reddish-yellow colour, conchoidal resinous fracture, and of an aromatic smell, 
which (to us) is like that of wormwood. Secondly, the opaque, of a dull, liver-yellow, 
gummy, and tougher in fracture, imported in calabashes, and with a smell the only 
analogue of which is just the “three ounces of a red-haired wench,” which the witches 
in ‘ Macbeth ’ add as the climax to their cauldron “ to raise the stench.” Thirdly, a 
