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THE OBSCURITY WHICH HAS ATTENDED THE OPERATION OF COMPOUND MEDICINES.
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It is evident that the fallacies to which our observations and experience are liable with respect to the efficacy of certain bodies, as remedies, must be necessarily multiplied when such bodies are exhibited in a state of complicated combination, since it must be always difficult, and often impossible, to ascertain to which ingredient the effects produced ought to be attributed.
How many frivolous substances have from this cause alone gained a share of credit, which belonged exclusively to the medicines with which they happened to be accidentally administered?[123] Numerous are the examples which I might adduce in proof of this assertion; the history of Bezoar[124] would in itself furnish a mass of striking evidence, indeed the reputation of this absurd substance was maintained much longer than it otherwise would have been, by its exhibition having been frequently accompanied with that of more active articles. Monardes, for instance, extols the efficacy of the Bezoar as a vermifuge, but he states that it should be mixed with the seeds of Wormwood. Besides, in the exuberance of mixture, certain re-actions and important changes are mutually produced, by which the identity of the original ingredients is destroyed; but this subject will be introduced for discussion in the first part of the Pharmacologia.