Page:Chronicles of pharmacy (Volume 1).djvu/108

 prescribed with his own hands, or at least superintended the production of them. According to Celsus, it was in Alexandria and about the year 300 that the division of the practice of medicine into distinct branches was first noticeable. The sections he names were Dietetics, Surgery and Pharmaceutics.

The physicians who practised dietetics were like our consultants, only more so. They were above all things philosophers, the recognised successors of the Greek thinkers and theorists, and but too often their imitators. Although they owed their designation to their general authority on régime, they prescribed and invented medicines. The pharmaceutical section came to be called in Latin medicamentarii, and their history corresponds closely with that of our English apothecaries. At first they prepared and administered the medicines which the physicians ordered. But in Alexandria and Rome they gradually assumed the position of general practitioners. To another class, designated by Pliny Vulnerarii, was left the treatment of wounds, and probably of tumours and ulcers. The necessity of a lower grade of medical practitioners in Rome is manifest from a remark of Galen's to the effect that no physician, meaning a person in his own rank, would attend to diseases of minor importance.

It is worthy of note that the Latin designation medicamentarius, which was nearly equivalent to the Greek pharmacopolis, was similarly used to mean a poisoner, while pharmakon in Greek and medicamentus in Latin might mean either a medicine or a poison.

It is noted elsewhere (page 52) that the word pharmakeia when it occurs in the New Testament is