dy in existence at the ancient
Spanish city of Cordova, and at other large municipalities under the
control of the Arabs, previous to the twelfth century. And as early as
1233, pharmacy laws had already been passed in the Two Sicilies. By that
time, it appears probable that medical prescriptions were no longer mere
superstitious formulas, but that they contained directions for
compounding material remedies having more or less medicinal virtues.

Modern medical prescriptions may be classed as lineal descendants of the
healing-spells of former ages. In the most ancient known
pharmacopoeia, a papyrus discovered about the year 1858 in the
Necropolis at Thebes, and believed to date from the sixteenth century
B. C., no invocations or symbols are found, nor were the latter
generally employed as prefixes to medical formulas prior to the first
century A. D.; when their use appears to have originated among the
Greeks and Romans, and the custom has continued until the present day.
At the time of the alchemists, in the sixteenth century, "the influence
of the Church on the minds of men, or perhaps the fear of the
Inquisition, led physicians to adopt an invocation to the Christian God;
just as they abbreviated a prayer to crossing themselves with their
fingers over their foreheads and breasts, so they contracted the
invocation to the sign of the cross as a superscription."[158:1]

Thus instead of the sign [Rx] some physicians began their prescriptions
with the Greek letters +Alpha.+ +Omega.+; or the letters J. D. for
_Juvante Deo_, C. D. for _Cum Deo_, or N. D. for _Nomine Dei_.

Dr. Rodney H. True, lecturer on botany at Harvard College, in a paper on
Folk Materia Medica, read at a meeting of the Boston branch of the
American Folk-Lore Society, February 19, 1901, gave a list of
therapeutic agents, mostly of animal origin, forming the stock in trade
of a European druggist some two hundred years ago. This list includes
the fats, gall, blood, marrow from bones, teeth, livers, and lungs of
various animals, birds, and reptiles; also bees, crabs, and toads,
incinerated after drying; amber, shells, coral, claws, and horns; hair
from deer and cats; ram's wool, partridge feathers, ants, lizards,
leeches, earth-worms, pearl, musk, and honey; eyes of the wolf,
pickerel, and crab; eggs of the hen and ostrich, cuttlefish bone, dried
serpents, and the hoofs of animals.

With the development of materia medica in Europe, the use of animal
drugs