strictly regulated, and it may well be that Alexander only provided the medicine to amuse his patient while he cured the gout by a calculated reduction of his luxuries. Alexander of Tralles was the author who recommended hermodactyls, supposed to be a kind of colchicum in gout; a remedy which was forgotten until its use was revived in a French proprietary medicine. His prescription compounded hermodactyls, ginger, pepper, cummin seeds, aniseeds, and scammony. He says it will enable sufferers who take it to walk immediately. He is supposed to have been the first to advocate the administration of iron for the removal of obstructions.
Mesuë and Serapion.
These names are often met with in old medical and pharmaceutical books, and there is an "elder" and a "younger" of each of them, so that it may be desirable to explain who they all were. The elder and the younger of each are sometimes confused. Serapion the Elder, or Serapion of Alexandria, as he is more frequently named in medical history, lived in the Egyptian city about 200 B.C., and was the recognised leader of the sect of the Empirics in medicine. He is credited with the formula that medicine rested on the three bases, Observation, History, and Analogy. No work of his has survived, but he is alleged to have violently attacked the theories of Hippocrates, and to have made great use of such animal products as castorum, the brain of the camel, the excrements of the crocodile, the blood of the tortoise, and the testicles of the boar.
Serapion the Younger was an Arabian physician who
