Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/538

534 earthworms, pearls, perspiration, saliva of a fasting man, scorpions, raw silk, silkworm's cocoons, moss from the skull of a man who has met a violent death, spermaceti, sponge, spider webs, cast off snake's skin, sea shells, swallows' nests, suet, viper's flesh, wax and woodlice; and along with these went those relics of the old Arabian polypharmacy, the theriacs and mithridates, which consisted of grand mixtures of anything and everything in the way of vegetable simples. In the seventeenth century there were actually "filth-pharmacopœias" (DreckApotheken). The only physician of the time who did not attach much importance to these remedies was the one who had the greatest fund of practical sense, Thomas Sydenham. In the pharmacopœias of 1721 and 1746, these nauseating remedies begin to disappear. One year before the latter date, William Heberden, who was probably the greatest English clinician between Sydenham and Bright, published his satirical pamphlet "Antitheriaka" (1745), which was, in effect, a critical onslaught on polypharmacy. Charles Lever tells of a certain individual who was "laughed out of Ireland." Heberden banished the theriacs and mithridates from medicine with the scholar's ironical smile, and with them went the filthier features of the materia medica. As a result of this cool douche of common sense, the Pharmacopœia of 1788 retains but a single animal remedy—woodlice. Yet these things were the crude elements of the present theory of treating certain diseases by means of animal extracts. Before the time of Brown-Séquard, the only animal extracts in our present pharmacopoeia were the antispasmodics, musk and castoreum, which used to be described to gaping students, receiving their first instruction in the action of drugs upon the human frame, as derivatives of the preputial gland and follicles of the Tibetan musk deer and the beaver, respectively.

Another set of observations which bears upon our subject is that connected with the universal interest in giants and dwarfs, the acromegalics and achondroplasics of modern pathology. The acromegalic giants go back to the legendary lore of the Nephelim in Genesis (VI. 4), of Og, king of Bashan, the Anakim, Goliath of Gath, the Titans, Antæus, Polyphemus, Fafner and Pasolt, Gog and Magog, down to the huge images of Manchuria, the innumerable reports of excavations of giant skeletal remains and the Irish, Chinese and Russian giants of more recent date. The achondroplasic dwarfs suggest the short-limbed satyrs, the dwarf gods of Egypt (Bes, Phtah and others), the black pygmy races, the court dwarfs and buffoons figured by Velasquez and