Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/56

 arsenic, borax, alum, potash, chloride of ammonium, gold, precious stones of different kinds, etc. The people of India were skilled in chemical and pharmaceutical work. The drugs were prepared by them in a great variety of ways—as, for instance, extracts of the juices of plants, infusions, decoctions, electuaries, mixtures, syrups, pills, pastes, powders, suppositories, collyria, salves, etc. Practicing physicians carried with them a sort of portable medicine chest, and they often collected, themselves, the medicinal plants which they required. Súsruta gives instructions as to the spots where certain plants are most likely to be found, and as to the seasons when they should be gathered. Charlatanry and mysticism often played a part in this business. Thus, it was maintained that drugs collected and prepared by persons other than physicians did not produce the desired effects. The fact that cosmetics (especially hair dyes), "elixirs of life," aphrodisiacs, poisons and antidotes for poisons, occupy the most prominent place in the list of pharmaceutic preparations sold, casts a glaring ray of light, as Neuburger states, on the degree of culture among the people of ancient India.

The list of separate maladies recognized by the physicians of the latter country is inordinately long. There were 26 kinds of fevers, 13 species of swellings of the lower abdomen, 20 different diseases due to worms, 20 kinds of urinary diseases, 8 varieties of strangury, 5 kinds of jaundice, 5 varieties of cough or asthma, 18 kinds of "leprosy," 6 kinds of abscesses, 76 different eye diseases, 28 affections of the ear, 65 disorders of the mouth, 31 nasal affections, 18 diseases of the throat, a large number of mental disorders, etc. It seems scarcely necessary to remark that these so-called diseases were in reality only groups of certain types of loosely related symptoms. The term "leprosy," for example, included, besides the disease which modern physicians call by that name, a number of different affections of the skin. It is worth noting here that diabetes mellitus, which is one of the twenty different kinds of urinary diseases enumerated in the classified list mentioned above, was first described by the physicians of