which was recommended for coughs was composed of 4 drms. each of juice of hemlock, juice of henbane, castorum, white pepper, and costus; and 1 drm. each of myrrh and opium.
Musa, a freed slave of Augustus, and apparently a sort of medical charlatan, but a great favourite with the Emperor, is alleged to have introduced the flesh of vipers into medical use especially for the cure of ulcers.
Celsus, Dioscorides, and Pliny, whose works are recognized as the storehouses of the science of Imperial Rome, belonged to the period under review. Celsus wrote either a little before or a little after the commencement of our era. He was the first eminent author who wrote on medicine in Latin. Pliny died A.D. 79, suffocated by the gases from Vesuvius, which in his eagerness to observe he had approached too near during an eruption. Dioscorides is supposed to have lived a little before Pliny, who apparently quotes him, but curiously never mentions his name, though usually most scrupulous in regard to his authorities.
Themison, who lived at Rome in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and who is said to have been the first physician to have distinguished rheumatism from gout, is noted in pharmacy as the author of the formulæ for Diagredium and Diacodium. He praised the plantain as a universal remedy, and is also the earliest medical writer to mention the use of leeches in the treatment of illness.
Several of the writers on medical subjects of this period adopted the method of prescribing their formulas and the instructions for compounding them in verse. The most famous instance is that of Andromachus, physician to Nero, whose elegiac verses describing the composition of his Theriakon are quoted by Galen.
