Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/358

 manner of preparing "Oisypum." Oisypum is identical with the modern "Lanolin" or "Lanolinum," and is a pure fat of wool. Mention is made of the preparation by four different authors of medical treatises during the following sixteen centuries—viz., by Aëtius in the sixth, by Paulus Aegineta in the seventh, by Nicolaus Myrepsus in the thirteenth, and by Valerius Cordus in the seventeenth. Subsequently to the latter date no further mention of the preparation is to be found in any of the pharmacopoeias except the French Codex of the year 1758, in which it is classed among the simple remedies under the title of "Oesipe." Finally Liebreich, toward the end of the nineteenth century, brought the preparation once more into favor under the name of "lanolin." The fact that it remained in complete oblivion for such very long periods of time is easily explained by the statement which Berendes makes: "It was a troublesome ointment to manufacture, and consequently the apothecaries disliked it and resorted to all sorts of falsifications."

With the advance of the Arab Renaissance pharmacy gradually became a regular established occupation in every fairly large city in the East. It is known, for example, that the first public apothecary shop in the city of Bagdad was established during the eighth century of the present era under the caliphate of Almansur; and about the same time, probably a little earlier, there existed at Djondisabour a similar pharmacy in connection with the school and hospital of the Bakhtichou family. The training of an apothecary in those days was probably the same as that of the physician. Originally pharmacists were called "Szandalani," probably because they dealt largely in sandal wood.

The materia medica furnished by the Arab physician Rhazes in the different works which he has written, is unusually rich in simple elements, the majority of which are always drugs of a rather mild action; Greece, Persia, Syria, East India and Egypt were the sources from which they were derived. Beside the simple elements, Rhazes mentions a number of composite preparations of drugs.