Line edit — Pharmacy and Patent Medicines

PHARMACY AND PATENT MEDICINES

Practitioners from ancient times prepared numerous medicinal remedies, many based on plants, metals, minerals, or stones and some were even concocted from animal products. The remedies and prescriptions for their use were often recorded in herbals, family recipe books, and pharmacopoeias (an authoritative list of drugs, their components and preparation and poiia, ‘making’). Apothecaries began to play a role in dispensing and selling drugs in the medieval Arabic world. In Europe in the early modern period apothecaries as well as itinerant quacks sold all sorts of potions to their clients.

Pharmacy derives its name from the Greek root pharmakon (meaning ‘a drug’) which was used to designate remedies, charms, and poisons. Those owning and running pharmacies also began to buy ‘patent’ or ‘proprietary’ medicines, often from commercial salesmen. With an increasing number of patent medicines on the market, regulations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were gradually introduced to prevent the sale of poisonous and ineffective medicines.

Collecting, Recording, and Exchanging Remedies and Medicinal Ingredients

From hunter-gatherers to modern-day herbalists, the search for natural plant remedies has a long history. In the days before any physician or pharmacist dreamt of being able to produce a little white pill or synthesise drugs, apothecaries, folk healers and ‘wise women’ would scour the countryside for all sorts of herbs, roots, seeds, etc. which could form the basis of medicinal remedies. Some of these remedies were recorded and collated into written and illustrated ‘herbals’ and ‘pharmacopoeia’. Others would fill the pages of ‘leech-books’, ‘recipe books’ and ‘commonplace books’, which might contain both medicinal and culinary recipes. Doctor’s casebooks are another revealing source of medicines often having the patient’s case history on one side of a divided page balanced by prescriptions on the other. Some of the natural remedies from plants have long been viewed as preferable to the violent purges of the day.

One of the most famous pharmacopoeias of the Roman Empire was written by the Greek physician, Pedanius Dioscorides, a military surgeon who trained in Alexandria, Egypt, and served for a time in the Roman Emperor Nero’s army. The five volumes of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica contained detailed descriptions of the appearance, harvesting, preparation, properties, uses and contradictions of over 600 medicinal herbs, as well as chapters on metals (like copper and lead), minerals (such as sea salt), and various spices. He also included precise drawings, practical explanations, and instructions for administration to patients. Dioscorides recommended remedies for a host of different problems including St John’s Wort, which is popular today as a treatment for mild depression. Galen of Pergamon’s (a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher) pharmacopoeia embraced the therapies of his predecessor, Dioscorides. Among his many medications were vegetable derivatives, which came to be known as galenicals, or simples.

A great many of the medications and plants used in ancient Egypt found their way into the herbals of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Galen and Pliny. The medical papyri of ancient Egypt – including the Ebers Papyrus which contains around 700 drugs – contain numerous descriptions of remedies from a variety of sources, including well-known ones such as opium, honey, garlic, and hemlock as well as their lesser-known counterparts fried mouse, hippopotamus fat, and human and animal faeces. Eye diseases and disorders were some of the most prevalent ailments in the hot, dry, and dusty climate and were treated by different lotions and salves, containing substances such as antinomy, goose grease, fried ox liver, myrrh, minerals and milk (including human milk).