Page:Chronicles of pharmacy (Volume 1).djvu/121

 an annual salary of 10,000 drachmas. The last-named ruler also brought to Bagdad the Nestorian Christian, Jahiah-Ebn-Masawaih, who, under the name of Mesuë the Elder, retained a reputation for his formulas even up to the publication of the London Pharmacopœia.

Mesuë is noted for his opposition to the violent purgative medicines which the Greek and Roman physicians had made common, and he had much to do with the popularisation, if not with the introduction of, senna, cassia, tamarinds, sebestens, myrabolans, and jujube. He modified the effects of certain remedies by judicious combinations, as, for example, by giving violet root and lemon juice with scammony. He gave pine bark and decoction of hyssop as emetics, and recommended the pancreas of the hare as a styptic in diarrhœa.

A disciple of Mesuë's, Ebn-Izak, added greatly to the medical resources of the Arabs by translations of the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Pliny, Paul of Egineta, and other Greek authors.

Abu-Moussah-Dschafar-Al-Soli, commonly called Geber, the equivalent of his middle name, is supposed to have lived in the eighth century. It has already been remarked that the chemical discoveries attributed to this philosopher were probably the achievements of many workers, and were afterwards collected and passed on to posterity as his alone. From him are dated the introduction into science, to be adopted later in medicine, of corrosive sublimate, of red precipitate, of nitric and nitro-muriatic acids, and of nitrate of silver.

These chemical discoveries must have been made within the hundred years from 750 to 850, because Rhazes, who wrote in the latter half of the ninth century, mentions them. Geber has been supposed to