VIII
PHARMACY IN GREAT BRITAIN.
For none but a clever dialectician
Can hope to become a great physician:
That has been settled long ago.
Logic makes an important part
Of the mystery of the healing art;
For without it how could you hope to show
That nobody knows so much as you know.
—Longfellow: "Golden Legend."
British Pharmacy in Saxon England.
The condition of medicine and pharmacy in Saxon times has been carefully portrayed in three volumes published, in 1864, under the authority of the Master of the Rolls at the expense of the Treasury. These were edited by the Rev. Oswald Cockayne, M.A., and appeared under the title of "Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft." Many old documents were translated and explained, and from these the ideas of medicine in these islands a thousand years ago were made manifest.
Mr. Cockayne gave at length a Saxon Herbarium, written, he supposed, about the year 1000, and professing to be a translation from Apuleius, a Roman physician of the second century, with additions from Dioscorides, and some from native science. A few
