lived towards the end of the tenth century and wrote a work on materia medica which was much used for some five or six hundred years.
Mesuë the Elder was first physician at the court of Haroun-al-Raschid in the ninth century. He was born at Khouz, near Nineveh, in 776, and died at Bagdad in 855. Under his superintendence the School of Medicine of Bagdad was founded by Haroun. Although a Nestorian Christian, Mesuë retained his position as first physician to five Caliphs after Haroun. To his teaching the introduction of the milder purgatives, such as senna, tamarinds, and certain fruits is supposed to be due. His Arabic name was Jahiah-Ebn-Masawaih.
Mesuë the Younger is the authority generally meant when formulas under his name, sometimes quaintly called Dr. Mesuë in old English books, are quoted. He lived at Cairo about the year 1000. He was a Christian, like his earlier namesake, and is believed to have been a pupil or perhaps a companion of Avicenna; at all events, when the latter got into disgrace it is alleged that both he and Mesuë took refuge in Damascus. At Damascus Mesuë wrote his great work known in Latin as Receptarium Antidotarii. From the time of the invention of printing down to the middle of the seventeenth century, when pharmacopœias became general, more than seventy editions of this work, mostly in Latin, but a few in Italian, have been counted. In some of the Latin translations he is described as "John, the son of Mesuë, the son of Hamech, the son of Abdel, king of Damascus." This dignity has been traced to a confusion of the Arabic names, one of which was very similar to the word meaning king. Nearly half of the formulæ in the first London Pharmacopœia were quoted from him.
