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PREHISTORIC TIME
- Presumably, curiosity led prehistoric man to touch, to taste and to rub on his skin everything that came to hand and to discover the irritating, emetic and purging properties of certain earth's moulds, plants and animal tissues.
- Sorcerers, shamans and others with special knowledge of natural poisons used these substances both to kill and to heal. Through illness or death they punished enemies or tribal wrongdoers; they tipped arrows with malignant extracts.
- A survival of this practice is our word "toxicology", "toxic" from the Greek words toxon ("bow") and toxicon (pharmacon) "poison, with which arrows were tipped" and logos ("speech", "word").
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ANCIENT GREECE AND BYZANTIUM TIMES
- In the Western world the ancient Greeks were probably the first to dissociate medicine from magic and religion.
- Plato (427-347 BC) reported the death of Socrates (470-399 BC) by hemlock (Conium maculatum).
- Aristotle (384-322 BC) was familiar with the venom of jellyfishes and scorpion fishes.
- In the 1st century AD, Pedanius Dioskorides, a Greek army surgeon, wrote on many terrestrial plants used as drugs and also recorded the toxic nature of sea hares, polychaete worms, stingrays and sea vipers.
- The term Mithridatism is well known in pharmacology. It is named after the king Mithridates of Pontus (112-63 BC), an enemy of the Roman Empire. To avoid his assassination, he took small doses of poison to immunise his organism against it. He was the first to develop antidotes in his quest of the universal antidote.
- The recognition of poisonous fishes in biblical times is clearly depicted when in "The Bible" Moses admonishes the Israelites: "These you shall eat of all that are in the waters which have fins and scales; and whatsoever hath not fins and scales you may not eat, for it is unclean" (Deuteronomy 14:9-10).
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