Introductory Lecture. 
287 
Medica in this Institution. The first duty incident to the 
charge, is to introduce the subject to your notice, and to re- 
commend it to your favour. For this purpose, I now address 
you. It is scarcely necessary for me to state, that Materia 
Medica is the science which treats of the history, properties, 
and relations of medicinal substances. Its origin must have 
been nearly coeval with that of disease. Pain seeks for re- 
lief no less than hunger for satisfaction; and the same combi- 
nation of instinct and reason which discovers food for health, 
finds also medicine for sickness. No tribe of men is so sa- 
vage and destitute as not to possess its list of remedies. But, 
in his ignorance of the laws of external nature, and of those 
which regulate his own system, the uncultivated man not un- 
frequently ascribes the cures he may have experienced or ob- 
served to wrong causes; and, in the apparent absence of any 
physical agent, often spares himself the trouble of investiga- 
tion by an easy resort to the intervention of supernatural in- 
fluences. Hence the Materia Medica of a people advanced 
beyond the lowest grades of barbarism is apt to be loaded 
with superfluities, and deformed by superstition; and in this 
state was the science at the date of its earliest records among 
the ancients. 
Little remains to us of all that was written on the subject 
of medicines before the time of Celsus. This author, who 
lived in the first century of our era, and is celebrated as the 
most classical of the Latin medical writers, enumerates most 
of the substances then employed as remedies, and gives the 
ingredients of various compound preparations; but his notices 
are meagre, and, in general, simply therapeutical, and convey 
no accurate knowledge of the substances mentioned. The 
first work especially devoted to the subject of medicines was 
that of Scribonius Largus, written during the reign of the 
Emperor Claudius. It is the oldest Pharmacopoeia extant, 
and presents the most precise information in our possession 
of the modes of preparing medicines then in vogue. After 
Scribonius, followed successively Dioscorides, Pliny, and 
Galen, of whom the first and the last may be considered as 
