Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [13]
Apprentice apothecaries were not generally permitted to become masters before the age of 25, and this suggests that Jeronimus submitted his masterpieces—which would have been treatises on the proper treatment of some illness, or perhaps upon the preparation of a poison—in about 1623. Evidently they were good enough to impress his examiners and, as a newly qualified pharmacist, he now became a member of the trinity of physicians, apothecaries, and surgeons who made up the medical establishment of early modern Europe.
The physicians, who were university graduates, were by far the most haughty and prestigious of these three groups. They had labored for years to master the medical theories of the time and reserved for themselves the sole right to write prescriptions and issue diagnoses. They were enormously grand and distant personalities, who charged huge fees, distinguished themselves from ordinary professionals by donning long gowns and mortarboards, and invariably wore gloves when seeing patients to ensure there could be no actual contact between them. Only the very wealthiest could afford their services; even in the largest cities there were rarely more than a dozen physicians to every 50,000 people.
In the rare cases where some sort of physical intervention became necessary—and, given the contemporary ignorance of anesthesia and antiseptics, this was always a last resort—a surgeon would be called. Surgeons ranked below both the physicians and the apothecaries in the trinity, and it was their duty to set bones, trepan skulls, lance boils, and deal with the more unpleasant and contagious ailments that were rife at the time. The treatment of venereal disease, done with solutions of mercury, was within the province of the surgeons. It also fell to them to treat the plague-stricken, since physicians generally shied away from the most virulent epidemics.
It was, however, far more common for a consultation with a physician to result in a referral to an apothecary. Contemporary medical opinion held that virtually all ailments could be traced to disturbances in the balance of the four humors that were thought to exist within the body, or mismanagement of the six “nonnaturals” that maintained good health or provoked disease. Apothecaries existed to prepare treatments designed to remedy such imbalances and manage the nonnaturals. If they did their job correctly, the full recovery of the patient was—at least in theory—guaranteed.
In the dingy recesses of an apothecary’s shop lurked pots and pillboxes by the hundred—each containing one of the many hundreds of ingredients required to make the incredibly complex preparations of the day. Most drugs were concocted from parts of several different plants, always with an addition of animal products and sometimes with the admixture of metals. Roots and herbs were the principal ingredients, but apothecaries were also required to be familiar with considerably more exotic ingredients. Unicorn horn was greatly sought after. Excrement was widely prescribed—pigeon droppings were a cure for epilepsy, and horse manure was effective against pleurisy—and the sex organs of wild animals were held to be particularly efficacious. Dried wild boar penis, for example, was thought to reduce phlegm.
To modern eyes, at least, the most unusual ingredient in any apothecary’s store was “mummy,” ground human flesh taken (at least in theory) directly from plundered Egyptian tombs. It was a popular cure-all, supposedly effective against almost every ailment from headaches to bubonic plague. The best mummy had a “resinous, harden’d, black shining surface,” an acrid taste, and a fragrant smell. When supplies from Egypt were