Note 569 — Chapter IV · GALEN

M. Berthelot, “Sur les voyages de Galien et de Zosime dans l’Archipel et en Asie, et sur la matière médicale dans l’antiquité,” in Journal des Savants (1895), pp. 382-7. The article is chiefly devoted to showing that an alchemistic treatise attributed to Zosimus copies Galen’s account of his trips to Lemnos and Cyprus. Of such future copying of Galen we shall encounter many more instances.

As for the terra sigillata, C. J. S. Thompson, in a paper on “Terra Sigillata, a famous medicament of ancient times,” published in the Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Congress of Medical Sciences, London, 1913, Section XXIII, pp. 433-44, tells of various medieval substitutes for the Lemnian earth from other places, and of the interesting religious ceremony, performed in the presence of the Turkish officials on only one day in the year by Greek monks who had replaced the priestess of Diana. Pierre Belon witnessed it on August 6th, 1533. By that time there were many varieties of the tablets, “because each lord of Lemnos had a distinct seal.” When Tozer visited Lemnos in 1890 the ceremony was still performed annually on August sixth and must be completed before sunrise or the earth would lose its efficacy. Mohammedan khodjas now shared in the religious ceremony, sacrificing a lamb. But in the twentieth century the entire ceremony was abandoned. Through the early modern centuries the terra sigillata continued to be held in high esteem in western Europe also, and was included in pharmacopeias as late as 1833 and 1848. Thompson gives a chemical analysis of a sixteenth century tablet of the Lemnian earth and finds no evidence therein of its possessing any medicinal property. Agricola in the sixteenth century wrote in his work on mining (De re metal., ed. Hoover, 1912, II, 31), “It is, however, very little to be wondered at that the hill in the Island of Lemnos was excavated, for the whole is of a reddish-yellow color which furnishes for the inhabitants that valuable clay so especially beneficial to mankind.”