Examination of Officinal Medicines

...he used these grains in place of an emetic original: "vomitorii"; a substance used to induce vomiting for the treatment of fevers, sometimes with a happy outcome, and sometimes with an unhappy one, as he himself frankly confessed to me. But even if we suppose that a stomach full of phlegm is sometimes less harmed by such a poison, is it therefore given safely? Is it permissible to offer it indiscriminately to everyone, even to those of more delicate and tender constitutions? And if at any time it should turn out badly, how shall we avoid the mark of rashness? Compare the observations of Dr. Georg Ernst Stahl A famous 17th-century German chemist and physician known for the phlogiston theory, Professor at Halle, in his Curious Chemical-Physical-Medical Observations, the fifth month.

And what of the 3. Pigments? Common bole a medicinal clay, chalk, ochre, red earth, natural verdigris copper acetate, manufactured and crystallized verdigris, yellow white-lead and red-lead, manufactured cinnabar mercury sulfide, graphite, iron-colored calamine, silver leaf, writing and "musical" silver, fine and two-toned gold leaf, as well as writing gold. Add to these what the vegetable kingdom supplies: Red, purple, and yellow Brazilwood, Indian blue indigo, litmus, Florentine lake and lake in rolls, annatto, juice of buckthorn, and those items under the title of turnsole cloths dyed with the juice of the three-seeded heliotrope, or of mulberry or cherries. For although some of these are occasionally called into medical use by certain people, there is nonetheless no notable or singular use for them that would prevent other official medicines from being substituted in their place without danger or loss. Nor does it follow that because certain simple substances must be received into specific compositions, they must therefore be kept in the pharmacies under that name. For by the same law that bismuth, magnets, sublimated mercury mercury chloride, English tin, zinc, scorpions, tartar, hound's-tongue root, cacao beans with vanilla and Indian corn are omitted from the catalog of "simples" individual medicinal ingredients—even though they are required for the Magistery of Bismuth, Croll’s styptic plaster, sweet mercury calomel, Poterius’s antihectic, flowers of zinc, oil of scorpions, fixed salt, spirit and tincture of tartar, pills of hound's-tongue, and chocolate—by that same law, red-lead, verdigris, chalk, etc., are omitted, even though they enter into the Red-Lead Plaster, the Egyptian Ointment, and others.