What does Rx stand for and where did it come from?

Was sitting in class when this topic was brought up so I decided to divulge into the literature and get to the bottom of this. Over the last year I've heard various accounts on its true meaning so here is what I found according to the good old "reliable" any one can post anything Internet. Even Wikipedia didn't give me a great answer.

Theory one: "The symbol Rx is derived from the major lines in the symbol of the Eye of Horus. Horus was an Egyptian god, the god of Nekhen, a village in Egypt, and god of the sky, of light, and of goodness. He was the son of Isis, the nature goddess, and Osiris, the god of the underworld. Osiris was murdered by his evil brother Seth, the god of darkness and evil. Horus sought to avenge his father’s death by challenging his uncle Seth to a fight. Seth cut out Horus’s eye, but Thoth, a god associated with wisdom and compassion, magically restored the eye. Horus did defeat Seth, finally. Horus’s eye, also called the wadjet eye, became a symbol for health. The Egyptians considered it a symbol of good and restored health."

Theory two: Rx is an abbreviation for the Latin word "recipere" or "recipe," which means "Take, thou."


Theory three: Devils, Drugs, and Doctors, written in 1931: "Rx is not, as is frequently supposed, an abbreviation of a Latin word meaning recipe or compound, but is an invocation to Jupiter, a prayer for his aid to make the treatment effective...sometimes in old medical manuscripts all the R's occurring in the text were crossed." This is one is quite interesting because the Rx isn't really supposed to be Rx but actually Rj with a line through it making it look like an X for Jupiter.


Pick your theory....personally I like #3 the best.


Till next time