SUBJECTS materia medica

Asbestos has been known and used for millennia (Theophrastus, fourth century B.C.). The subject of much scholarly comment since Pliny s Natural History and Dioscorides De Materia Medica in the first century, asbestos was known through a large quantity of fact and fable by the late seventeenth century when the modem era of mineral materials began (Plot, 1686 Ciam-pini, 1701 Gimma, 1730 Ledermuller, 1775 and Schroeter, 1772). 

Oswald Crollius, or Croll, (1580-1609) was another influential advocate of Paracelsus, and a contributor to the chemical remedies. His Bascilica Chemica, Frankfurt, 1608, often republished, was his most popular work. It contained an exposition of the teachings of Paracelsus, a treatise on materia medica in which he emphasizes the chemical medicines, and a treatise on the doctrine of Signatures, a subject also treated in the Paracelsan literature, and which assumes that medicinal plants or other sources... 

Although pharmacy was not affected by aU of these factors in the same ways, this was the milieu in which both pharmacists and physicians—for better or for worse—had to operate. Since the fundamental role of pharmaceutists (as the more formally trained often referred to themselves at the time) was to ensure the quality of the ingredients and accuracy of the compounded prescriptions, they served primarily as guarantors and implementers of the materia medica developed from the physician s corpus of knowledge about disease, diagnosis, and therapeutics. In short, what physicians thought about these subjects appreciably affected virtually everything pharmacists did. 

Stille asserts the conventional wisdom regarding counter-irritation by saying, apart from all theoretical or analogical illustrations of the subject, the fact is patent that spontaneous inflammations aggravate, while artificial inflammations, duly regulated, palliate or cure those which arise primarily or idiopathically. (See his Therapeutics and Materia Medica, 1 223). 

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