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Group 5 PhAd 11 MWF 3:30 – 4:30 Submitted to: Ms.

Nasalyn Espinosa

Ancient Pharmacy in Rome – Sts. Cosmas and Damian

There are many physicians and many pharmacists living today who would be willing to accept
beatification and canonization for services rendered. They would not even believe it necessary to prove
their eligibility; they would admit it. There are two characters jointly linked with pharmacy and
medicine, however, which for more than fifteen hundred years have been revered in European
professional circles as the patron Saints of these two callings. They are St. Cosmas and Damian. Their
story is so unusual that it seems belong to the mythology rather than to the history of the professions.

If one tries to learn something about them in the ordinary reference works, little or nothing is found.
Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica is silent concerning them. When we do piece together the fragments
of the story as found in various sources, mainly in the older pharmaceutical literature, we find they were
of sufficient importance in the early days of the church for Justinian to erect a basilica to their memory
in Constantinople, and pope Felix IV to erect a church to their memory in Rome, both in the 6th century.

The traditions say that they were mohammedans by birth, but having embraced Christianity, they were
shining marks for the agents of the emperor Diocletian when he undertook to wipe out Christianity in
the first decade of the century made famous by Constantine, the emperor who changed the name of
Byzantium to Constantinople. They lived in the Syrian city of egea, whose mayor name’s lysias arrested
them and condemned them to death for being Christians. They are supposed to have been brothers,
one pharmacist and the other a physician. at this time it was forbidden for Christians to practice the
healing arts, and the tradition also says that it was in the period that physicians placed the sign of Jupiter
of Zeus at the head of their prescriptions, to prove their adherence to the ancient faith, the remnants of
which practice still remains in the stroke across Rx in that familiar symbol of the prescriptions, in
modern medicine and pharmacy.

The mythical part of their story is concerned with their execution. Drowning was first tried but an angel
loosed their bonds and aided them to swim ashore. And then after that, when the emperor knew about
it, he hurriedly gave another order to burn them. And unusually, when the burning rite began, The Fire
They casted upon them had miraculously jumped over to the executioner leaving them unburned. And
so the emperor got mad he ordered to tie the two in a cross and archers would shot them with arrows
but the arrows turned from them and struck those who had placed them on the crosses. Finally, the
emperor lost his temper and ordered to behead them, and they were successful on killing the two and
their souls were seen mounting and rising up to heaven wards...

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