Am.  Jour.  Pharnr  ) 
Aug.,  1876.  i 
The  History  of  some  Drugs. 
361 
Many  curious  facts  are  connected  with  the  way  of  their  propagation 
throughout  Europe,  both  in  early  and  in  the  middle  ages.  As  to  Eng- 
land, I  am  entitled  to  suppose  that  there  are  existing  but  an  extremely 
limited  number  of  sources  of  valuable  information  about  the  subject 
under  notice  which  had  escaped  the  careful  investigation  of  my  lamen- 
ted friend.    As  to  the  continent,  there  is  in  the  library  of  the  British 
777'C 
Museum   an  interesting  volume  marked  — - — -  (Pharmacopoeia),  and 
entitled  "  Valor  she  taxatio  omnium  materierum  medicarum  .  .  .  quae  in 
qfficind  pharmaceutica  Swinphordiand  venundantur"  printed  at  Giessen, 
1614.  This  is  the  tariff  of  drugs  and  compound  medicines  which  were 
to  be  met  with  in  the  pharmaceutical  shop  of  Schweinfurt  on  the  Main, 
then  one  of  the  numerous  free  cities  of  the  old  German  Empire.  The 
establishment  (Apotheke)  was  not  a  private  business,  but  remained  from 
A.D.  1412  until  the  year  1803  the  property  of  the  commonwealth  of 
that  imperial  town,  and  was  managed — under  the  superintendence  of  the 
physicians — by  an  apothecary  appointed  by  the  magistrate.  The  tariff 
was  therefore  settled  by  this  authority.  The  same  may  be  said  with 
regard  to  many  other  German  towns,  a  fact  which,  no  doubt,  depends 
upon  a  good  deal  of  public  interest  already  devoted  in  those  early 
times  to  pharmaceutical  matters.  Thus  the  volume  alluded  to  con- 
tains not  only  the  "  tax  "  of  Schweinfurt,  but  also  those  of  Bremen 
(1644),  of  Basel  (1647),  °f  Rostock  (1659),  of  Quedlinburg  (1665), 
and  Frankfurt  (1669).  Daniel  Hanbury  at  once  appreciated  the  useful- 
ness of  these  documents,  which  we  subsequently  made  free  use  of,  as 
may  be  seen  from  several  pages  of  the  "  Pharmacographia  "  (77,  177, 
234). 
It  was  evident  that  similar  medicine  tariffs  must  have  been  in  vigor 
throughout  the  numberless  States,  so  very  different  in  size,  which  were 
formerly  termed  the  German  Empire;  and  not  only  tariffs,  but  most 
of  them  had  their  own  pharmacopoeia  and  medico-pharmaceutical  laws. 
Since  my  late  friend  first  drew  my  attention  to  the  said  volume  in  the 
British  Museum,  I  have  succeeded  in  perusing — for  the  same  purposes 
— somewhat  more  than  one  hundred  of  similar  lists  or  tariffs  of  German 
towns,  ranging  from  the  year  1558  down  to  the  middle  of  the  last  cen- 
tury. They  are  scattered  in  various  public  libraries  throughout  Ger- 
many, but  I  learn  from  A.  N.  von  Scheerer's  "  Literatura  Pharmaco- 
poearum,"  Leipzig,  1822,  p.  232,  that  there  are  about  forty  more  of 
