Red spider.
Resin.
Rhamnus.
Rhus.
Ricinus.
Rock rose.
Rose.
Rosemary.
Ruby.
Rue.
Saffron.
Sagapenum.
Sage.
Salt.
Samphire.
Sandarach.
Scammony.
Sea water.
Secundines of a woman.
Sepia.
Serpent.
Sesame.
Seseli.
Silver.
Sisymbrium.
Solanum.
Spurge.
Squill.
Stag (horns, &c.).
Stavesacre.
Styrax.
Succinum.
Sulphur.
Sweat.
Tarragon.
Tetragonon.
Thaspia.
Thistles (various).
Thlapsi.
Thuja.
Thyme.
Torpedo (fish).
Trigonum.
Tribulus.
Turpentine.
Turtle.
Umbilicus veneris.
Verbascum.
Verbena.
Verdigris.
Verjuice.
Violet.
Wax.
Willow.
Woad.
Worms.
Worm seed.
This list may be taken to have comprised pretty fairly the materia medica of the Greeks as it was known to them when Hippocrates practised, and as it is not claimed that he introduced any new medicines it may be assumed that these formed the basis of the remedies used in the temples of Æsculapius, though perhaps some of them were only popular medicines.
The temples of Æsculapius were in all those ages the repositories of such medical and pharmaceutical knowledge as was acquired. The priests of these temples were called Asclepiades, and they professed to be the descendants of the god. Probably the employment of internal medicines was a comparatively late development. Plato remarks on the necessarily limited medical knowledge of Æsculapius. Wounds, bites of serpents, and occasional epidemics, he observes, were the principal troubles which the earliest physicians had to treat. Catarrhs, gout, dysentery, and lung diseases only came with luxury. Plutarch and Pindar say much the same. The latter specially mentions that Æsculapius had recourse to prayers, hymns, and incantations in mystic
