Word: pharmacopoeias
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...student's faith was supposed to extend to 1,000 or more herbs, minerals, metals and even precious stones listed in the ayurvedic pharmacopoeia. (The gems were once favored by the practitioners who list themselves in India's telephone books as "sex splst," were supposed to increase virility. With the republican leveling-down, few patients can afford ground-up precious stones, or even pearls. So they settle for sea shells. But they still flock to the ayurvedic sex splst...
...instance, are persistently hunted all over Southeast Asia because they are believed to have medicinal value. The Chinese consider powdered rhinoceros horn a powerful aphrodisiac (it is not), and will pay $2,500 for a single horn. Other parts of the animal, too have honored places in the Asian pharmacopoeia. Cups made of rhino horn detect poison by shattering to bits or by making the poison bubble. Rhino shin is good for leg trouble; the hip cures female disorders. Even the dung is beneficial for skin ailments...
With his stylus of sharpened reed, the physician made neat, wedge-shaped marks on a clay tablet, carefully compiling a pharmacopoeia. His calligraphy was better than most doctors': he got more than a dozen formulas on the two sides of a tablet little bigger than a modern picture postcard. Then the sands of the desert covered the great Sumerian city of Nippur (90 miles southeast of Babylon), and the physician's secrets were lost for thousands of years...
Last week the University of Pennsylvania announced that after many years of effort, one of its scholars had succeeded in translating part of the oldest-known pharmacopoeia, dating from about 2100 B.C. The university's Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer needed the help of Pennsylvania State College's Dr. Martin Levey, a specialist in the history of science, to figure out the materia medica which the ancient physician was prescribing. Most were dissolved in wine or beer, e.g.: "Grind to a powder pear-tree wood and the moon plant, then pour kushumma wine over it and let [plain...