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Although this popular medicine was only made official by being adopted in the B. P. Additions, 1874, it had already acquired reputation as a pleasant laxative in household medicine, and had been familiar in German pharmacy for the better part of a century. It first appeared in the Prussian Pharmacopœia in 1799, and had been devised by a noted physician of Berlin, Dr. E. G. Kurella, who died in the year named. He called the mixture Pectoral Powder, and he made an electuary from similar ingredients.

The Prussian powder looks like a modification of a compound senna powder included in the first London Pharmacopœia, 1618. This contained senna, liquorice, caraway, fennel, cumin, spikenard, cinnamon, galangal, and gromwell seeds. Its "first contriver" (says Quincy) was Isaac Hollandicus.

So far as can be traced Paracelsus first used the term opodeldoc (or as it is generally found in his works, opodelloch or opodeltoch). If he invented the word it is probable that he did not derive it from any etymological elements. Various suggestions have been made from time to time in explanation of the term, but without any sound basis. The most ingenious one is given by Hermann Peters in his "Pictorial History of Ancient Pharmacy." He derives it from the first syllabic of opoponax, the second syllable of bedellium, and the third syllable of aristolochia root. These were the principal ingredients of the old opodeldoc plaster as it appeared in the last Nuremburg edition of the "Dispensatory of Valerius Cordus."