more use of opium in Rome than the regular physicians. Galen expressly says that he never used the drug except in very urgent cases; but he enthusiastically commends several confections such as theriaca which owed their efficiency to opium more than to any other ingredient. Indeed it may be said that the fame of those compounds was due to opium, and that by them the medicinal employment of the drug was maintained during many centuries.
We know that Paracelsus owed much of his success to the bold way in which he administered opium to his patients; evidence that his contemporaries did not use it to any great extent. His followers were as enthusiastic as himself over the virtues of opium, and before long the most serious practitioners were advocating it, and devising formulas for its suitable administration. Platerus of Basle about 1600 strongly recommended it, and Sylvius (de la Boe) a Dutch physician said that without opium he would not practise. Van Helmont about 1640 used opium so frequently that he was called the Doctor Opiatus. Sydenham about 1680 says, "Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium." Many other eminent physicians might be cited to the same effect, and some who took an opposite view. Stahl, for instance, wrote a treatise entitled De Imposturis Opii. Hoffmann considered that the use of opium was greatly abused, and he believed his ether would fulfil its purpose in almost all cases.
Quassia
was sent to Linnæus from Surinam in 1763 by C. D. Dallberg, one of his pupils, with the statement that
