Pharmacy · a Light

Pharmacy split from medicine and got its own book

Sabur ibn Sahl, a physician who died in 869, compiled the earliest known Arabic formulary standing on its own: a book of compound remedies, each with its ingredients, quantities, method of preparation, dose and use. Books of this kind, called aqrabadhin, were kept in hospital pharmacies and copied for the shops, and later hospitals commissioned their own. The trade was policed from outside. A market inspector, the muhtasib, checked the apothecaries, and the surviving inspection manuals tell him how to detect a drug cut with something cheaper, how to test weights, and which substitutions count as fraud. Making up medicines had become a separate occupation from prescribing them, with its own literature, its own shops and its own ways of being caught out.

Sabur ibn Sahl · died 869 CE