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Oribasius^[125] recommends in high terms certain combinations of Evacuant and Roborant medicines, and the remarks of Alexander Trallianus on a remedy which he exhibited in paralysis, serve to shew that he was well acquainted with the fact, that certain substances lose their efficacy when they stimulate the bowels to excess, for he cautions us against adding a greater proportion of Scammony to it; many, he observes, think that by so doing, they increase the force of the medicine, whereas in fact they make it useless, by carrying it immediately through the bowels, instead of suffering it to remain and be conveyed to the remote parts.

In modern Europe, the same attachment to luxuriancy of composition has been transmitted to our own times: there are several prescriptions of Huxham extant, which contain more than four hundred ingredients. I have already observed that all extravagant systems tend, in the course of time, to introduce practices of an opposite kind; this truth finds another powerful illustration in the history of medicinal combination, and it becomes a serious question, which it will be my duty to discuss, whether the disgust so justly excited by the poly-pharmacy of our predecessors, may not have induced the physician of the present day to carry his ideas of simplicity too far, so as to neglect and lose the advantages which in many cases beyond all doubt may be obtained by scientific combinations. “To those,” says Sir A. Crichton, “who think that the Science of Medicine is improved by an affected simplicity in prescribing, I would remark, that modern pharmacopœias are shorn so much of old and approved receipts,^[126] on account of their being extraordinary compounds, so as to be almost useless in some cases.”