snakes were important ingredients in the pharmacopoeia.  The practice became very widespread throughout the ancient world.  Its extent and importance may be best gathered from chapters vii and VIII in the 28th book of Pliny’s “Natural History.”  Several remedies are mentioned as derived from man; others from the elephant, lion, camel, crocodile, and some seventy-nine are prepared from the hyaena.  The practice was widely prevalent throughout the Middle Ages, and the pharmacopoeia of the seventeenth and even of the eighteenth century contains many extraordinary ingredients.  “The Royal Pharmacopoeia” of Moses Charras (London ed., 1678), the most scientific work of the day, is full of organotherapy and directions for the preparation of medicines from the most loathsome excretions.  A curious thing is that with the discoveries of the mummies a belief arose as to the great efficacy of powdered mummy in various maladies.  As Sir Thomas Browne remarks in his “Urn Burial”:  “Mummy has become merchandize.  Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.”

One formula in everyday use has come to us in a curious way from the Egyptians.  In the Osiris myth, the youthful Horus loses an eye in his battle with Set.  This eye, the symbol of sacrifice, became, next to the sacred beetle, the most common talisman of the country, and all museums are rich in models of the Horus eye in glass or stone.

“When alchemy or chemistry, which had its cradle in Egypt, and derived its name from Khami, an old title for this country, passed to the hands of the Greeks, and later of the Arabs, this sign passed with it.  It was also adopted to some extent by the Gnostics of the early Christian church in Egypt.  In a cursive form it is found in mediaeval translations of the works of Ptolemy the astrologer, as the sign of the planet Jupiter.  As such it was placed upon horoscopes and upon formula containing drugs made for administration to the body, so that the harmful properties of these drugs might be removed under the influence of the lucky planet.  At present, in a slightly modified form, it still figures at the top of prescriptions written daily in Great Britain (Rx)."(11)

     (11) John D. Comrie:  Medicine among the Assyrians and
     Egyptians in 1500 B.C., Edinburgh Medical Journal, 1909, n.
     s., II, 119.

For centuries Egyptian physicians had a great reputation, and in the Odyssey (Bk.  IV), Polydamna, the wife of Thonis, gives medicinal plants to Helen in Egypt—­“a country producing an infinite number of drugs . . . where each physician possesses knowledge above all other men.”  Jeremiah (xlvi, 11) refers to the virgin daughter of Egypt, who should in vain use many medicines.  Herodotus tells that Darius had at his court certain Egyptians, whom he reckoned the best skilled physicians in all the world, and he makes the interesting statement that:  “Medicine is practiced among them on a plan of separation; each physician treats a single disorder, and no more:  thus the country swarms with medical practitioners, some under taking to cure diseases of the eye, others of the head, others again of the teeth, others of the intestines, and some those which are not local."(12)