Response to Drugs and Psychiatry

Abstract

Fashion is more deep-rooted than contemporary custom will allow, and the current enthusiasm for drug treatment in psychiatry is no evanescent fad. The Greeks made good use of the pharmacopœia, prescribing borage, buglosse, marigold, polypodie and epithyme for melancholy, more specifically recommending wormwood, centaury and pennyroll for the hypochondriac malady. Burton (a) discussing black hellebor, relates that its virtues were extolled by Galen, Pliny and Coelius Aurelianus, the mentally afflicted being sent to the Anticyrae, or to Phocis in Achaia to be purged, the plant growing there in abundance. Burton (b) describes how the Melangoga, or melancholy purging medicines, were classified as simple or compound, purging upwards or downwards. Asarum, brassivola, laurel, scilla, white hellebor, and antimony purged upwards, whereas polypodie, epithyme, black hellebor, lapis lazuli and aloes purged downwards. Sceptics throve then, no doubt, as they do now. Meryon (1861) mentions Asclepiades—dismissed by Pliny as an impudent quack, who contended that drugs injured the stomach and induced complaints more dangerous than those which they were intended to cure.