We are guilty, we hope, of no irreverence towards those great nations to which the human race owes art, science, taste, civil and intellectual freedom, when we say that the stock bequeathed by them to us has been so carefully improved that the accumulated interest now exceeds the principal.Macaulay: “Essay on Lord Bacon” (1837).
We are guilty, we hope, of no irreverence towards those great nations to which the human race owes art, science, taste, civil and intellectual freedom, when we say that the stock bequeathed by them to us has been so carefully improved that the accumulated interest now exceeds the principal.
Macaulay: “Essay on Lord Bacon” (1837).
It has been a subject of lively dispute whether Dioscorides lived before or after Pliny. It seems certain that one of these authors copied from the other on particular matters, and in neither case is credit given. Pliny was bornA.D.23 and diedA.D.79, and would therefore have lived under the Emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian. Suidas, the historian, who probably wrote in the tenth century, dates Dioscorides as contemporary with Antony and Cleopatra, aboutB.C.40, and some Arab authorities say he wrote at the time of Ptolemy VII, which would be still a hundred years earlier. But Dioscorides dedicates his great work on materia medica to Areus Asclepiades, who is otherwise unknown, but mentions as a friend of his patron the consul Licinius Bassus. There was a consul Lecanius Bassus in thereign of Nero, and it is therefore generally supposed that Dioscorides was in his prime at that period, and would consequently be a contemporary of Pliny’s. It is possible that both authors drew from another common source.
Dioscorides was a native of Anazarbus in Cilicia, a province where the Greek spoken and written was proverbially provincial. Our word solecism is believed to have been derived from the town of Soloe in the same district. The Greek of Dioscorides is alleged to have been far from classical. He himself apologises for it in his preface, and Galen remarks upon it. Nevertheless Dioscorides maintained for at least sixteen centuries the premier position among authorities on materia medica. Galen complains that he was sometimes too indefinite in his description of plants, that he does not indicate exactly enough the diseases in which they are useful, and that he does not explain the degrees of heat, cold, dryness, and humidity which characterise them. He will often content himself with saying that a herb is hot or cold, as the case may be. As an illustration of one of his other criticisms Galen mentions the Polygonum, of which he notes that Dioscorides says “it is useful for those who urinate with difficulty.” But Galen adds that he does not particularise precisely the cases of which this is a symptom and which the Polygonum is good for. But these defects notwithstanding, Galen recognises that Dioscorides is the best authority on the subject of the materials of medicine.
It is generally stated that Dioscorides was a physician; but of this there is no certain evidence. According to his own account he was devoted to the study and observation of plants and medical substances generally,and in order to see them in their native lands he accompanied the Roman armies through Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. This was the easiest method of visiting foreign countries in those days. It is not unlikely that he went as assistant to a physician, perhaps to the one to whom he dedicated his book. That is to say, he may have been an army compounder. Suidas says of him that he was nicknamed Phocas, because his face was covered with stains of the shape of lentils.
In his treatise on materia medica, “Peri Ules Iatrikes,” or, according to Photius, originally “Peri Ules,” On Matter, only, he describes some six hundred plants, limiting himself to those which had or were supposed to have medicinal virtues. He mentions, besides, the therapeutic properties of many animal substances. Among these are roasted grasshoppers, for bladder disorders; the liver of an ass for epilepsy; seven bugs enclosed in the skin of a bean to be taken in intermittent fever; and a spider applied to the temples for headache.
Dioscorides also gives a formula for the Sal Viperum, which was a noted remedy in his time and for long afterwards. His process was to roast a viper alive in a new earthen pot with some figs, common salt, and honey, reducing the whole to ashes. A little spikenard was added to the ashes. Pliny only adds fennel and frankincense to the viper, but Galen and later authors make the salt a much more complicated mixture.
His botany is very defective. He classifies plants in the crudest way; often only by a similarity of names. Of many his only description is that it is “well-known,” a habit which has got him into much trouble withmodern investigators who have looked into his work for historical evidence verifying the records of herbs named in other works. Hyssop is an example. As stated in the section entitled “The Pharmacy of the Bible,” it has not been found possible to identify the several references to hyssop in the Bible. Dioscorides contents himself by saying that it is a well-known plant, and then gives its medicinal qualities. But that his hyssop was not the plant known to us by that name is evident from the fact that in the same chapter he describes the “Chrysocome,” and says of it that it flowers in racemes like the hyssop. He also speaks of an origanum which has leaves arranged like an umbel, similar to that of the hyssop. It is evident, therefore, that his hyssop and ours are not the same plant.
The mineral medicines in use in his time are also included in the treatise of Dioscorides. He mentions argentum vivum, cinnabar, verdigris, the calces of lead and antimony, flowers of brass, rust of iron, litharge, pompholix, several earths, sal ammoniac, nitre, and other substances.
Other treatises, one on poisons and the bites of venomous animals, and another on medicines easy to prepare, have been attributed to Dioscorides, but it is not generally accepted that he was the author. The best known translation of Dioscorides into Latin was made by Matthiolus of Sienna in the sixteenth century. The MS. from which Matthiolus worked is still preserved at Vienna and is believed to have been written in the sixth century.
The very competent authority Kurt Sprengel, while recognising the defects in the Materia Medica of Dioscorides, credits him with the record of many valuable observations. His descriptions of myrrh,bdellium, laudanum, asafoetida, gum ammoniacum, opium, and squill are selected as particularly useful; the accounts he gives of treatments since abandoned (some of which are mentioned above, but to these Sprengel adds the application of wool fat to wounds which has been revived since he wrote), are of special interest; and the German historian further justly points out that many remedies re-discovered in modern times were referred to by Dioscorides. Among these are castor oil, though Dioscorides only alludes to the external application of this substance; male fern against tape worms; elm bark for eruptions; horehound in phthisis; and aloes for ulcers. He describes many chemical processes very intelligently, and was the first to indicate means of discovering the adulterations of drugs.
No writer of either ancient or modern times can compare with Claudius Galenus probably in the abundance of his output, but certainly in the influence he exercised over the generations that followed him. For fifteen hundred years the doctrines he formulated, the compound medicines he either introduced or endorsed, and the treatments he recommended commanded almost universal submission among medical practitioners. In Dr. Monk’s Roll of the College of Physicians, mention is made of a Dr. Geynes who was admitted to the Fellowship of the College in 1560, “but not until he had signed a recantation of his error in having impugned the infallibility of Galen.”[2]Thiswas at the time when to deny Galen meant to follow Paracelsus, and the contest was fiercer just then than at any time before or since.
There is of course no authentic likeness of Galen in existence. The Royal College of Physicians possesses an unquestionably antique bust, copied in Pettigrew’s Medical Portraits (and illustrated in the margin), which is traditionally credited with being a representation of the Physician of Pergamos. It was presented to the College by Lord Ashburton, to whom it was presented by Alexander Adair, who had acquired it from his relative Robert Adair, principal surgeon to the British forces at the siege of Quebec. This Robert Adair was a man of considerable eminence in his profession, and is described as a man of character and a scholar. Beyond this very slight evidence there is no authority for the presumption that the bust was intended for Galen. The other portrait is copied from the diploma of the Pharmaceutical Society, but this is not said to have any history. With these may be compared the portrait given on the title page of the first London Pharmacopœia. The conclusion will probably be reached that we have no idea what manner of man the eminent physician was.
There is of course no authentic likeness of Galen in existence. The Royal College of Physicians possesses an unquestionably antique bust, copied in Pettigrew’s Medical Portraits (and illustrated in the margin), which is traditionally credited with being a representation of the Physician of Pergamos. It was presented to the College by Lord Ashburton, to whom it was presented by Alexander Adair, who had acquired it from his relative Robert Adair, principal surgeon to the British forces at the siege of Quebec. This Robert Adair was a man of considerable eminence in his profession, and is described as a man of character and a scholar. Beyond this very slight evidence there is no authority for the presumption that the bust was intended for Galen. The other portrait is copied from the diploma of the Pharmaceutical Society, but this is not said to have any history. With these may be compared the portrait given on the title page of the first London Pharmacopœia. The conclusion will probably be reached that we have no idea what manner of man the eminent physician was.
There is of course no authentic likeness of Galen in existence. The Royal College of Physicians possesses an unquestionably antique bust, copied in Pettigrew’s Medical Portraits (and illustrated in the margin), which is traditionally credited with being a representation of the Physician of Pergamos. It was presented to the College by Lord Ashburton, to whom it was presented by Alexander Adair, who had acquired it from his relative Robert Adair, principal surgeon to the British forces at the siege of Quebec. This Robert Adair was a man of considerable eminence in his profession, and is described as a man of character and a scholar. Beyond this very slight evidence there is no authority for the presumption that the bust was intended for Galen. The other portrait is copied from the diploma of the Pharmaceutical Society, but this is not said to have any history. With these may be compared the portrait given on the title page of the first London Pharmacopœia. The conclusion will probably be reached that we have no idea what manner of man the eminent physician was.
Galen was born at Pergamos, in Asia Minor,A.D.131, and died in the same city betweenA.D.200 and 210. His father was an architect of considerable fortune, and the son was at first destined to be a philosopher, but while he was going through his courses of logic, Nicon (the father) was advised in a dream to direct the youth’s studies in the direction of medicine. It will be seen directly that Galen’s career was a good deal influenced by dreams.
Nothing was spared to obtain for the youth the best education available, though his father died when he was 21. After exhausting the Pergamos teachers, Galen studied at Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria. Then he travelled for some years through Cilicia, Phœnicia, Palestine, Scyros, and the Isles of Crete and Cyprus. He commenced practice at Pergamos when he was 29 and was appointed Physician to the School of Gladiators in that city. At 33 he removed to Rome and soon acquired the confidence and friendship of many distinguished persons, among them Septimus Severus, the Consul and afterwards Emperor, Sergius Paulus, the Prætor, the uncle of the reigning Emperor, Lucius Verus, many of whom he cured of various illnesses.
His success caused bitter jealousy among the other Greek physicians then practising in Rome. They called him Paradoxologos, and Logiatros, which meant that he was a boaster and a master of phrases. It appears that he was able to hold his own in this wordy warfare. Some of his opponents he described as Asses of Thessaly, and he also made allegations against their competence and probity. However, he quitted Rome in the year167, and as at a later time he left Aquilea, both movings being coincident with the occurrence of serious plagues, his reputation for courage has suffered. It was at this period of his life that he visited Palestine to see the shrub which yielded Balm of Gilead, and then proceeded to Armenia to satisfy himself in regard to the preparation of the Terra Sigillata. He was able to report that the general belief that blood was used in the process was incorrect.
It was to Aquilea that Galen was sent for by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was there preparing a campaign against the Marcomans, a Germanic nation dwelling in what is now called Bohemia. Marcus Aurelius was in the habit of taking Theriaca, and would have none but that which had been prepared by Galen. He urged Galen to accompany him on his expedition, but the physician declined the honour and the danger, alleging that Æsculapius had appeared to him in a dream, and had forbidden him to take the journey. The Emperor therefore sent him to Rome and charged him with the medical care of his son Commodus, then 11 years of age. Galen is said to have done the world the ill-service of saving the life of this monster. Galen retained the favour of Marcus Aurelius till the death of the Emperor, and continued to make Theriaca for his successors, Commodus, Pertinax, and Septimus Severus. He died during the reign of the last named Emperor.
Galen is sometimes said to have kept a pharmacy in the Via d’Acra at Rome, but his “apotheca” there appears to have been a house where his writings were kept and where other physicians came to consult them. This house was afterwards burned, and it is supposed that a number of the physician’s manuscripts were destroyed in that fire.
His medical fame began to develop soon after his death. In about a hundred years Eusebius, Bishop of Cæsarea, reproaches the world with treating Galen almost as a divinity. Nearly all the later Roman medical writers drew freely from his works, and some seemed to depend entirely on them. Arabic medicine was largely based on Galen’s teaching, and it was the Arabic manuscripts translated into Latin which furnished the base of the medical teaching of Europe from the eleventh and twelfth centuries to the eighteenth.
Galen aimed to create a perfect system of physiology, pathology, and treatment. He is alleged to have written 500 treatises on medicine, and 250 on other subjects, philosophy, laws, grammar. Nothing like this number remains, and the so-called “books” are often what we should call articles. His known and accepted medical works number eighty-five. All his writings were originally in Greek.
Oribasius, like Galen, was a native of Pergamos, and was physician to and friend of the Emperor Julian. He is noted for having compiled seventy-two books in which he collected all the medical science of preceding writers. This was undertaken at the instance of Julian. Only seventeen of these books have been preserved to modern times. Oribasius adds to his compilation many original observations of his own, and in these often shows remarkable good sense. He was the originator of the necklace method of treatment, for he recommends a necklace of beads made of peony wood to be worn in epilepsy, but does not rely on this means alone.
Aetius, who lived either in the fifth or sixth century, was also a compiler, but he was besides a great authority on plasters, which he discusses and describes at enormous length. He was a Christian, and gives formulas of words to be said when making medicinal compounds, such as “O God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, give to this remedy the virtues necessary for it.” In the works of Aetius, mention is made of several nostrums famous in his time for which fabulous prices were charged. The Collyrium of Danaus was sold in Constantinople for 120 numismata. If this means the nummus aureus of Roman money it would be equal to nearly £100 of our money. At this price, Aetius says, the Collyrium could only be had with difficulty. He also mentions a Colical Antidote of Nicostratus called very presumptuously Isotheos (equal to God), which sold for two talents.
The remedy devised by Aetius for gout was called Antidotos ex duobus Centaureae generibus, and was the same as the compound which became popular in this country under the title of Duke of Portland’s Powder. (See page 309). Aetius prescribed a regimen along with his medicine extending over a year. In September the patient was to take milk; in October, garlic; in November to abstain from baths; December, no cabbage; in January to take a glass of pure wine every morning; in February to eat no beet; in March to be allowed sweets in both food and drink; in April, no horse radish; in May, no Polypus (a favourite dish); in June, to drink cold water in the morning; in July, no venery; in August, no mallows.
This writer, who acquired considerable celebrity as a medical authority, lived a little later than Aetius, towards the end of the sixth century. He was a native of Tralles, in Lydia, and is much esteemed by the principal medical historians, Sprengel, Leclerc, Freind, and others who have studied his writings. Especially notable is his independence of opinion; he does not hesitate occasionally to criticise even Galen. He impresses strongly on his readers the danger of becoming bound to a particular system of treatment. The causes of each disease are to be found, and the practitioner is not to be guided exclusively by symptoms. Among his favourite drugs were castorum, which he gave in fevers and many other maladies; he had known several persons snatched from the jaws of death by its use in lethargy (apoplexy); bole Armeniac, in epilepsy and melancholia; grapes and other ripe fruits instead of astringents in dysentery; rhubarb appeared as a medicine for the first time in his writings, but only as an astringent; and he was the first to use cantharides for blisters in gout instead of soothing applications. His treatment of gout by internal remedies and regimen recalls that of Aetius and is worth quoting. He prescribed an electuary composed of myrrh, coral, cloves, rue, peony, and aristolochia. This was to be taken regularly every day for a hundred days. Then it was to be discontinued for fifteen days. After that it was to be recommenced and continued during 460 days, but only taking a dose every other day; then after another interval thirty-five more doses were to be taken on alternate days, making 365 doses altogether in the course of nearly two years. Meanwhile the diet wasstrictly regulated, and it may well be that Alexander only provided the medicine to amuse his patient while he cured the gout by a calculated reduction of his luxuries. Alexander of Tralles was the author who recommended hermodactyls, supposed to be a kind of colchicum in gout; a remedy which was forgotten until its use was revived in a French proprietary medicine. His prescription compounded hermodactyls, ginger, pepper, cummin seeds, anise seeds, and scammony. He says it will enable sufferers who take it to walk immediately. He is supposed to have been the first to advocate the administration of iron for the removal of obstructions.
These names are often met with in old medical and pharmaceutical books, and there is an “elder” and a “younger” of each of them, so that it may be desirable to explain who they all were. The elder and the younger of each are sometimes confused. Serapion the Elder, or Serapion of Alexandria, as he is more frequently named in medical history, lived in the Egyptian city about 200B.C., and was the recognised leader of the sect of the Empirics in medicine. He is credited with the formula that medicine rested on the three bases, Observation, History, and Analogy. No work of his has survived, but he is alleged to have violently attacked the theories of Hippocrates, and to have made great use of such animal products as castorum, the brain of the camel, the excrements of the crocodile, the blood of the tortoise, and the testicles of the boar.
Serapion the Younger was an Arabian physician wholived towards the end of the tenth century and wrote a work on materia medica which was much used for some five or six hundred years.
Mesuë the Elder was first physician at the court of Haroun-al-Raschid in the ninth century. He was born at Khouz, near Nineveh, in 776, and died at Bagdad in 855. Under his superintendence the School of Medicine of Bagdad was founded by Haroun. Although a Nestorian Christian, Mesuë retained his position as first physician to five Caliphs after Haroun. To his teaching the introduction of the milder purgatives, such as senna, tamarinds, and certain fruits is supposed to be due. His Arabic name was Jahiah-Ebn-Masawaih.
Mesuë the Younger is the authority generally meant when formulas under his name, sometimes quaintly called Dr. Mesuë in old English books, are quoted. He lived at Cairo about the year 1000. He was a Christian, like his earlier namesake, and is believed to have been a pupil or perhaps a companion of Avicenna; at all events, when the latter got into disgrace it is alleged that both he and Mesuë took refuge in Damascus. At Damascus Mesuë wrote his great work known in Latin as Receptarium Antidotarii. From the time of the invention of printing down to the middle of the seventeenth century, when pharmacopœias became general, more than seventy editions of this work, mostly in Latin, but a few in Italian, have been counted. In some of the Latin translations he is described as “John, the son of Mesuë, the son of Hamech, the son of Abdel, king of Damascus.” This dignity has been traced to a confusion of the Arabic names, one of which was very similar to the word meaning king. Nearly half of the formulæ in the first London Pharmacopœia were quoted from him.
For several centuries before the era of modern pharmacopœias the Antidotary of Nicolas Myrepsus was the standard formulary, and from this the early dispensatories were largely compiled. This Nicolas, who was not the Nicolas Praepositus of Salerno, is sometimes named Nicolas Alexandrinus. He appears to have been a practising physician at Constantinople, and as he bore the title of Actuarius, it is supposed that he was physician to the Emperor. He is believed to have lived in the thirteenth century. Myrepsus, which means ointment maker, was a name which he assumed or which was applied to him, probably in allusion to his Antidotary.
This was the largest and most catholic of all the collections of medical formulas which had then appeared. Galen and the Greek physicians, the Arabs, Jews, and Christians who had written on medicine, were all drawn upon. A Latin translation by Leonard Fuchs, published at Nuremberg in 1658, contains 2,656 prescriptions, every possible illness being thus provided against. The title page declares the work to be “Useful as well for the medical profession and for the seplasarii.” The original is said to have been written in barbarous Greek.
Sprengel, who has hardly patience to devote a single page to this famous Antidotary, tells us that the compiler was grossly ignorant and superstitious. He gives an instance of his reproduction of some Arab formulæ. One is the use of arsenic as a spice to counteract the deadly effects of poisons. This advice was copied, he says, down to the seventeenth century. It was Nicolas’s rendering of the Arabic word Darsini,which meant cannella, and which they so named because it was brought from China.
The compounds collected in this Antidotary are of the familiar complicated character of which so many specimens are given in this volume. Many of the titles are curious and probably reminiscent of the pious credulity of the period when Myrepsus lived. There is, for example, the Salt of the Holy Apostles, which taken morning and evening with meals, would preserve the sight, prevent the hair from falling out, relieve difficulty of breathing, and keep the breath sweet. It was obtained by grinding together a mixture of herbs and seeds (hyssop, wild carrot, cummin, pennyroyal, and pepper) with common salt. The Salt of St. Luke was similar but contained a few more ingredients.
A Sal Purgatorius prescribed for the Pope Nicholas consisted of sal ammoniac, 3 oz., scammony, 3 drachms, poppy seeds, 2 drachms, orris root, 3 drachms, pepper, 13 grains, one date, pine nut 25 grains, and squill 2 drachms. This might be made into an electuary with honey.
Antidotus Acharistos, which means unthanked antidote, is stated to be so named because it cured so quickly that patients were not sufficiently grateful. They did not realise how bad they might have been without it.
An electuary said to have been prescribed for King David for his melancholy was composed of aloes, opium, saffron, lign-aloes, myrrh, and some other spices, made up with honey. A Sal Sacerdotale (salt combined with a few spices) stated to have been used by the prophets in the time of Elijah had come down to this Antidotary through St. Paul.
The life of Raymond Lully is so romantic that it is worth telling, though it only touches pharmaceutical history occasionally. Born at Palma, in the island of Majorca, in 1235, in a good position of life, he married at the age of twenty-two, and had two sons and a daughter. But home life was not what he desired, and he continued to live the life of a gallant, serenading young girls, writing verses to them, and giving balls and banquets, to the serious derangement of his fortune. Ultimately he conceived a violent passion for a beautiful and virtuous married woman named Ambrosia de Castello who was living at Majorca with her husband. She, to check this libertine’s ardour, showed him her breast, ravaged by cancer. This so afflicted him that he set himself to study medicine with the object of discovering a cure for the cruel disease. With the study of medicine and of alchemy he now associated an insatiable longing for the deliverance of the world from Mohammedan error. He renounced the world, including it would seem his wife and children (though it is recorded that he first shared his possessions with his wife), and went to live on a mountain in a hut which he built with his own hands. This career, however, did not promise an early enough extirpation of infidels, so before long Lully is found travelling, and residing at Paris, Rome, Vienna, Genoa, Tunis, and in other cities, preaching new crusades, importuning the Pope to establish new orders of missionary Christians, and at intervals writing books on medicine. He had invented a sort of mathematical scheme which in his opinion absolutely proved the truth of Christianity, and by the use of diagrams he hoped to convert theSaracens. His ideas are set forth, if not explained, in hisArs Magna. In the course of his strange life he visited Palestine and Cyprus, and at Naples in 1293 he made the acquaintance of Arnold de Villanova. This learned man taught Lully much, and found a fervent discipline in him. He was more than seventy when, according to tradition, he travelled to London with the object of urging on Edward III a new war against the Saracens. Edward alleged his want of means, but Lully was prepared to meet the difficulty, and some of the historians of the science of the period assert that he coined a lot of gold for the purpose of the new crusade. Edward promptly used this money for the war with France, in which he was more interested. Disappointed and disgusted, Lully left England, and some time after,at the age of seventy-eight, set out to visit Jerusalem. Having accomplished that journey he visited several of the cities of North Africa on his way back, and at Bougia, after preaching with his usual vehemence against the Mohammedan heresy, he was stoned by the Moors and left for dead. Some friendly merchants took his body on their ship bound for his native Majorca. He revived, but died on the voyage in his eightieth year,A.D.1415. His tomb is still shown in the church of San Francisco in the City of Palma.
Raymond Lully.(From a portrait in the Royal Court and State Library, Munich.)
Raymond Lully.
(From a portrait in the Royal Court and State Library, Munich.)
Raymond Lully is particularly famous in pharmaceutical history for the general use of the aqua vitae or aqua ardens which he introduced. He had learned the process of distilling it from wine from Arnold of Villanova, who had himself probably acquired it from the Arab chemists of Spain, but Lully discovered the art of concentrating the spirit by means of carbonate of potash. Of the aqua vitae which he made he declared that “the taste of it exceedeth all other tastes, and the smell of it all other smells.”
Hieronymo Frascatoro, generally known as Jerome Frascator, was a physician and poet of high repute in the early part of the sixteenth century. Frascator was born at Verona in 1483 and died near that city in 1553. As a physician he aided the Pope, Paul III, to get the Council of Trent removed from Germany to Italy by alarming the delegates into believing that they were in imminent danger of an epidemic. They therefore adjourned to Bologna. Frascator especially studied infectious diseases, and his celebrated Diascordium, which is described in the section entitled “The Four OfficinalCapitals,” was invented as a remedy for the Plague. His great literary fame depended principally on a Latin poem he wrote with the now repellent title of “Syphillides, sive Morbi Gallici,” in three books. This was published in 1530. The author did not accept the view that this disease had been imported from America. He held that it had been known in ancient times, and that it was caused by a peculiar corruption of the air. His hero, Syphilis, had given offence to Apollo, who, in revenge, had poisoned the air he breathed. Syphilis is cured by plunging three times in a subterraneous stream of quicksilver. The best classical scholars of the age regarded the poem as the finest Latin work written since the days when that language was in its full life, and they compared it appreciatively with the poems of Virgil. The following lines will serve as a specimen:—
... nam saepius ipsiCarne sua exutos artus, squallentia ossaVidimes, et foedo rosa era dehiscere hiatuOra, atque exiles renentia guttura voces.
... nam saepius ipsiCarne sua exutos artus, squallentia ossaVidimes, et foedo rosa era dehiscere hiatuOra, atque exiles renentia guttura voces.
... nam saepius ipsiCarne sua exutos artus, squallentia ossaVidimes, et foedo rosa era dehiscere hiatuOra, atque exiles renentia guttura voces.
... nam saepius ipsi
Carne sua exutos artus, squallentia ossa
Vidimes, et foedo rosa era dehiscere hiatu
Ora, atque exiles renentia guttura voces.
The name of the disease was acquired from this poem, and though it has a Greek form and appearance, no ancient derivative for it can be suggested. Frascator also wrote a poem on hydrophobia.
The name and works of Basil Valentine are inseparably associated with the medical use of antimony. His “Currus Triumphalis Antimonii” (the Triumphal Chariot of Antimony) is stated in all text-books to have been the earliest description of the virtues of this important remedy, and of the forms in which it mightbe prescribed. And very wonderful indeed is the chemical knowledge displayed in this and other of Valentine’s writings.
Basil Valentine.(From the Collection of Etchings in the Royal Gallery, Munich.)
Basil Valentine.
(From the Collection of Etchings in the Royal Gallery, Munich.)
Basil Valentine explains the process of fusing iron with this stibium and obtaining thereby “by a particular manipulation a curious star which the wise men before me called the signet star of philosophy.” He commences the treatise already mentioned by explaining that he is a monk of the Order of St. Benedict, which (I quote from an English translation by Theodore Kirkringius, M.D., published at London in 1678) “requires another manner of Spirit of Holinessthan the common state of mortals exercised in the profane business of this World.”
After thus introducing himself he proceeds to mingle chemistry, piety, and abuse of the physicians and apothecaries of his day with much repetition though with considerable shrewdness for about fifty pages. At last, after many false starts, he expounds the origin and nature of antimony, thus:—
“Antimony is a mineral made of the vapour of the Earth changed into water, which spiritual syderal Transmutation is the true Astrum of Antimony; which water, by the stars first, afterwards by the Element of Fire which resides in the Element of Air, is extracted from the Elementary Earth, and by coagulation formally changed into a tangible essence, in which tangible essence is found very much of Sulphur predominating, of Mercury not so much, and of Salt the least of the three. Yet it assumes so much Salt as it thence acquires an hard and unmalleable Mass. The principal quality of it is dry and hot, or rather burning; of cold and humidity it hath very little in it, as there is in common Mercury; in corporal Gold also is more heat than cold. These may suffice to be spoken of the matter, and three fundamental principles of Antimony, how by the Archeus in the Element of Earth it is brought to perfection.”
It needs some practice in reading alchemical writings to make out the drift of this rhapsody, and no profit would be gained by a clear interpretation of the mysticism. It may, however, be noted that the Archeus was a sort of friendly demon who worked at the formation of metals in the bowels of the earth; that all metals were supposed to be compounds of sulphur, mercury, and salt in varying proportions, the sulphurand the salt, however, being refined spiritual essences of the substances we know by these names; and that it was a necessary compliment to pay to any product which it was intended to honour to trace its ancestry to the four elements.
As the author goes on to deal with the various compounds or derivatives from antimony, it is abundantly clear that he writes from practical experience. He describes the Regulus of Antimony (the metal), the glass (an oxy-sulphide), a tincture made from the glass, an oil, an elixir, the flowers, the liver, the white calx, a balsam, and others.
Basil Valentine’s scathing contempt for contemporary medical practitioners calls for quotation. “The doctor,” he says, “knows not what medicines he prescribes to the sick; whether the colour of them be white, black, grey, or blew, he cannot tell; nor doth this wretched man know whether the medicament he gives be dry or hot, cold or humid.... Their furnaces stand in the Apothecaries’ shops to which they seldom or never come. A paper scroll in which their usual Recipe is written serves their purpose to the full, which Bill being by some Apothecary’s boy or servant received, he with great noise thumps out of his mortar every medicine, and all the health of the sick.”
Valentine concludes his “Triumphal Chariot” by thus apostrophising contemporary practitioners:—“Ah, you poor miserable people, physicians without experience, pretended teachers who write long prescriptions on large sheets of paper; you apothecaries with your vast marmites, as large as may be seen in the kitchens of great lords where they feed hundreds of people; all you so very blind, rub your eyes and refresh your sight that you may be cured of your blindness.”
In the same treatise Basil Valentine describes spirit of salt which he had obtained by the action of oil of vitriol on marine salt; brandy, distilled from wine; and how to get copper from pyrites by first obtaining a sulphate, then precipitating the metal by plunging into the solution a blade of iron. This operation was a favourite evidence with later alchemists of the transmutation of iron into copper.
According to some of his biographers Basil Valentine was born in 1393; others are judiciously vague and variously suggest the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth century. That he was a Benedictine monk, he tells us himself, and several monasteries of the order have been named where he is supposed to have lived and laboured.
Many medical historians have doubted whether such a person as Basil Valentine ever existed. His writings are said to have been circulated in manuscript, but no one has ever pretended to have seen one of those manuscripts, and the earliest known edition of any of Basil Valentine’s works was published about 1601, by Johann Thölde, a chemist, and part owner of salt works at Frankenhausen in Thuringia. It is rather a large claim on our credulity, or incredulity, to assume that Thölde was himself the author of the works attributed to the old monk, and that he devised the entire fiction of the alleged discoveries, chemistry and all. It was not an uncommon thing among the alchemists and other writers of the middle ages to represent their books as the works of someone of acknowledged fame, just as the more ancient theologians were wont to credit one of the apostles or venerated fathers with their inventions. But it was not common for a discoverer to hide himself behind a fictitious sage whose existence he had himselfinvented. This theory is, however, held by some chemical critics.
It is certain that the real Basil Valentine could not have been so ancient as he was generally believed to be. Syphilis is referred to in the “Triumphal Chariot” as the new malady of soldiers (Neue Krankheit der Kriegsleute), as morbus Gallicus, and lues Gallica. It was not known by these names until the invasion of Naples by the French in 1495. Another allusion in the same treatise is to the use of antimony in the manufacture of type metal, which was certainly not adopted at any time at which Basil Valentine could have lived. Another reason for questioning his actual existence is that the most diligent search has failed to discover his name either on the provincial list or on the general roll of the Benedictine monks preserved in the archives of the order at Rome. Boerhaave asserted that the Benedictines had no monastery at Erfurt, which was generally assigned as the home of Valentine.
A curious item of evidence bearing on the allegation that Thölde was the fabricator of Basil Valentine’s works, or at least of part of them, has been indicated by Dr. Ferguson, of Glasgow, in his notes on Dr. Young’s collection of alchemical works. Thölde, it appears, had written a book in his own name entitled “Haliographia.” This is divided into four sections, namely: 1. Various kinds of Salts. 2. Extraction of Salts. 3. Salt Springs. 4. Salts obtained from metals, minerals, animals, and vegetables. This Part 4 of the work was subsequently published by Thölde among Basil Valentine’s writings. One of two things therefore is obvious. Either Thölde adopted a work by Valentine and issued it as his own, or one at least of the pieces alleged to have been by Valentine was really by Thölde.
Basil Valentine, meaning the valiant king, has assuredly an alchemical ring about it. It is exactly such a name as might be invented by one of the scientific fictionists of the middle ages. It is impossible, too, to read the “Triumphal Chariot,” at least when suspicion has been awakened, without feeling that the character of the pious monk is a little overdone. A really devout monk would hardly be proclaiming his piety on every page with so much vehemence. Then there is the legend which accounts for the long lost manuscripts. It is explained that they were revealed to someone, unnamed, when a pillar in a church at Erfurt was struck and split open by lightning, the manuscripts having been buried in that pillar. When this happened is not recorded.
In Kopp’s “Beitrage zur Geschichte der Chemie” the learned author argued that Thölde could only be regarded as an editor of Basil Valentine’s works, because when they were published they gave so many new chemical facts and observations that it was impossible to think that Thölde would have denied himself the credit of the discoveries if they had been his in fact. That book was published in 1875. In “Die Alchemie,” which Kopp published in 1886, he refers to Basil Valentine, and says that there is reason to think that the works attributed to him were an intentional literary deception perpetrated by Thölde.
No one man in history exercised such a revolutionary influence on medicine and pharmacy as the erratic genius Philipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. The name Paracelsus is believed to have been coined by himself, probably with the intention ofsomewhat Latinising his patronymic, von Hohenheim, and also perhaps as claiming to rank with the famous Roman physician and medical writer, Celsus. The family of Bombast was an old and honourable one from Württemberg, but the father of the founder of the iatro-chemists was a physician who had settled at Maria-Einsiedeln, a small town in Switzerland, not far from Zurich. He (the father) died at Villach, in Carinthia, in 1534, aged 71.
Theophrastus was an only child. He was born in 1490 or 1491, and owed to his father the first inclination of his mind towards medicine and alchemy. Later he was taught classics at a convent school, and at 16 went to the University of Basel. Apparently he did not stay there long. Classical studies, and the reverence of authorities, which the Universities taught, never attracted him. He is found next at Wurzburg, in the laboratory of Trithemius, an abbot of that city, and a famous adept in alchemy, astrology, and magic generally. He must have acquired much chemical skill in that laboratory, and, doubtless, many of his mystic views began to shape themselves under the instruction of the learned abbot. But Paracelsus was not content with the artificial ideas of the alchemists. By some means he became acquainted with the wealthy Sigismund Fugger, a mine owner in the Tyrol, and either as assistant or friend he joined him. The Fuggers were the Rothschilds of Germany at that time, and one of them entertained Charles V at Augsburg, when the famous diet at which the Emperor was to crush the Reformation was held in that city. On that occasion the wealthy merchant made a cinnamon fire for the Emperor, and lighted it with a bond representing a large sum which Charles owed him.
In the Tyrolese mines Paracelsus learned much about minerals, about diseases, and about men. Then he travelled through various parts of Europe, paying his way by his medical and surgical skill, or, as his enemies said, by conjuring and necromancy. He states that he was in the wars in Venice, Denmark, and the Netherlands; it is supposed as an army surgeon, for he afterwards declared that he then learned to cure forty diseases of the body. He boasted that he learned from gypsies, physicians, barbers, executioners, and from all kinds of people. He claims also to have been in Tartary, and to have accompanied the Khan’s son to Constantinople. Van Helmont tells us that it was in this city that he met an adept who gave him the philosopher’s stone. Other chroniclers relate that this adept was a certain Solomon Trismensinus, who also possessed the elixir of life, and had been met with some two hundred years later.
Although Paracelsus in his writings appears to hold the current belief in the transmutation of metals, and in the possibility of producing medicines capable of indefinitely prolonging life, he wasted no energy in dreaming about these, as the alchemists generally did. The production of gold does not seem to have interested him, and his aims in medicine were always eminently practical. It is true that he named his compounds catholicons, elixirs, and panaceas, but they were all real remedies for specific complaints; and in the treatment of these he must have been marvellously successful.
Whether he ever went to Tartary or not, and whether he served in any wars or not, may be doubtful. His critics find no evidence of acquaintance with foreign languages or customs in his works, and they do find indications of very elementary notions of geography.But it is certain that for ten years he was peregrinating somewhere; if his travels were confined to Germany the effect was the same. Germany was big enough to teach him. Passionately eager to wrest from Nature all her secrets, gifted with extraordinary powers of observation and imagination, with unbounded confidence in himself, and bold even to recklessness as an experimenter, this was a man who could not be suppressed. Armed with his new and powerful drugs, and not afraid to administer them, cures were inevitable; other consequences also, in all probability.
When, therefore, Paracelsus arrived at Basel, in the year 1525, in the thirty-second year of his age, his fame had preceded him. Probably he was backed by high influence. According to his own account he had cured eighteen princes during his travels, and some of these may have recommended him to the University authorities. It is to the credit of Paracelsus that he was warmly supported by the saintly priest Œcolampadius (Hausschein), who subsequently threw in his lot with the reformers. Besides being appointed to the chair of medicine and surgery, Paracelsus was made city physician.
His lectures were such as had never been heard before at a university. He began his course by burning the works of Galen and Avicenna in a chafing dish, and denouncing the slavish reliance on authority which at that time characterised medical teaching and practice. He taught from his own experience, and he gave his lectures in German. Many quotations of his boastful utterance have been handed down to us, and they match well with what we know of him from his recognised writings. All the universities had less experience than he, and the very down on his neck was more learnedthan all the authors. He likened himself to Hippocrates, the one ancient whom he esteemed. He contrasted himself with the doctors in white gloves who feared to soil their fingers in the laboratory. “Follow me,” he cried; “not I you, Avicenna, Galen, Rhazes, Montagnana, Mesuë, and ye others. Ye of Paris, of Montpellier, of Swabia, of Cologne, of Vienna; from the banks of the Danube, of the Rhine, from the islands of the seas, from Italy, Dalmatia, Sarmatia, and Athens, Greeks, Arabs, Israelites. I shall be the monarch, and mine shall be the monarchy.”
In his capacity as city physician he naturally created many enemies among his fellow practitioners. His friends said he cured the cases which they found hopeless; they said he only gave temporary relief at the best, and that his remedies often killed the patients. He fell foul, too, of the apothecaries. He denounced their drugs and their ignorance. The three years he spent in Basel must have been lively both for him and his opponents.
“In the beginning,” he says, “I threw myself with fervent zeal on the teachers. But when I saw that nothing resulted from their practice but killing, laming, and distorting; that they deemed most complaints incurable; and that they administered scarcely anything but syrups, laxatives, purgatives, and oatmeal gruel, with everlasting clysters, I determined to abandon such a miserable art and seek truth elsewhere.” Again he says: “The apothecaries are my enemies because I will not empty their boxes. My recipes are simple and do not call for forty or fifty ingredients. I seek to cure the sick, not to enrich the apothecaries.”
His career at Basel was brought to a close by a dispute with a prebendary of the cathedral namedLichtenfels, whom he had treated. The canon, in pain, had promised him 200 florins if he would cure him. The cure was not disputed, but as Paracelsus had only given him a few little pills, the clergyman relied on the legal tariff. Paracelsus sued him, and the court awarded the legal fee, which was six florins. The doctor published his comments on the case, and it can readily be supposed that they were of such a character as to amount to contempt of court. He found it advisable to leave Basel hurriedly.
Between 1528 and 1535 he lived and practised at Colmar, Esslingen, Nuremberg, Noerdlingen, Munich, Regensburg, Amberg, Meran, St. Gall, and Zurich. From Switzerland he again set forth, and records of him are to be traced in Carinthia and Hungary. Lastly, the Prince Palatine, Duke Ernst of Bavaria, took him under his protection, and settled him at Salzburg. There a few months afterwards he died. From dissipation and exhaustion, say his enemies; by assassination, say his friends. A German surgeon who examined his skull when the body was exhumed thirty years after death, found in it a fracture of the temporal bone, which, he declared, could only have been produced during life, because the bones of a solid but desiccated skull could not have separated as was the case here. It was suggested that some hirelings of the local doctors whose prospects were endangered by this formidable invader had “accidentally” pushed him down some rocks, and that it was then that the fracture was caused. A monument to this great medical revolutionist is still to be seen by the chapel of St. Philip Neri, at Salzburg. It is a broken pyramid of white marble, with a cavity in which is his portrait, and a Latin inscription which commemorates his cures of diseases,and his generosity to the poor in the following terms:—
“Conditur hic Philippus Theophrastus, insignis Medicinæ Doctor, qui dira illa vulnera, lepram, podagram, hydroposim, aliaque insanabilia contagia mirificu arte sustulit; ac bona sua in pauperes distribuenda collocandaque honoravit. Anno 1541, die 24 Septembr. vitam cum morte mutavit.”(“Here lies Philippus Theophrastus, the famous Doctor of Medicine, who by his wonderful art cured the worst wounds, leprosy, gout, dropsy, and other diseases deemed incurable and to his honour, shared his possessions with the poor.”)
“Conditur hic Philippus Theophrastus, insignis Medicinæ Doctor, qui dira illa vulnera, lepram, podagram, hydroposim, aliaque insanabilia contagia mirificu arte sustulit; ac bona sua in pauperes distribuenda collocandaque honoravit. Anno 1541, die 24 Septembr. vitam cum morte mutavit.”
(“Here lies Philippus Theophrastus, the famous Doctor of Medicine, who by his wonderful art cured the worst wounds, leprosy, gout, dropsy, and other diseases deemed incurable and to his honour, shared his possessions with the poor.”)
Among the contemporaries of Paracelsus were Luther, Columbus, and Copernicus. Their names alone are sufficient to show how the long-suppressed energy of the human intellect was at that period bursting forth. These four men were perhaps the greatest emancipators of the human race from the chains of slavish obedience to authority in the past thousand years. Paracelsus was not, so far as is known, a Lutheran Protestant. But he could not help sympathising with his heroic countryman. “The enemies of Luther,” he wrote, “are to a great extent fanatics, knaves, bigots, and rogues. You call me a medical Luther, but you do not intend to honour me by giving me that name. The enemies of Luther are those whose kitchen prospects are interfered with by his reforms. I leave Luther to defend what he says, as I will defend what I say. That which you wish for Luther you wish for me; you wish us both to the fire.” There was, indeed, much in common between these two independent souls.
Columbus landed in the Western world the year before Paracelsus was born. Luther burnt the Pope’s Bull at Wittenberg in 1520, and it was this action of his which at the time at least thrilled the German nation more than any other event in the history ofthe Reformation. It is evident that Paracelsus, in imitating the conduct of his famous contemporary, was only demonstrating his conviction that scientific, no less than religious, thought needed to free itself from the shackles of tyrannic tradition.
Such details of the personality of Paracelsus as have come down to us were written by his enemies. Erastus, a theologian as well as a physician, who may have met Paracelsus, and who fiercely attacked his system, depreciates him on hearsay. But Operinus, a disciple who had such reverence for him that when Paracelsus left Basel, he accompanied him and was with him night and day for two years, wrote a letter about him after his death to which it is impossible not to attach great importance.
In this letter Operinus expresses the most unbounded admiration of Paracelsus’s medical skill; of the certainty and promptitude of his cures; and especially of the “miracles” he performed in the treatment of malignant ulcers. But, adds Operinus, “I never discovered in him any piety or erudition.” He had never seen him pray. He was as contemptuous of Luther as he was of the Pope. Said no one had discovered the true meaning or got at the kernel of the Scriptures.
During the two years he lived with him, Operinus declares Paracelsus was almost constantly drunk. He was scarcely sober two hours at a time. He would go to taverns and challenge the peasantry to drink against him. When he had taken a quantity of wine, he would put his finger in his throat and vomit. Then he could start again. And yet Operinus also reportshow perpetually he worked in his laboratory. The fire there was always burning, and something was being prepared, “some sublimate or arsenic, some safran of iron, or his marvellous opodeldoch.” Moreover, however drunk he might be he could always dictate, and Operinus says “his ideas were as clear and consecutive as those of the most sober could be.”
According to this same letter Paracelsus had been an abstainer until he was 25. He cared nothing for women. Operinus had never known him undress. He would lie down with his sword by his side, and in the night would sometimes spring up and slash at the walls and ceiling. When his clothes got too dirty he would take them off and give them to the first passer, and buy new ones. How he got his money Operinus did not know. At night he often had not an obolus; in the morning he would have a new purse filled with gold.
It is not easy to form a fair judgment of Paracelsus from this sketch. Many writers conclude that Operinus was spiteful because Paracelsus would not tell him his secrets. More likely Operinus left his master because his religious sentiments were shocked by him. Paracelsus was evidently a born mocker, and it may be that he took a malicious delight in making his disciple’s flesh creep. Operinus gives an instance of the levity with which his master treated serious subjects. He was sent for one day to see a poor person who was very ill. His first question was whether the patient had taken anything. “He has taken the holy sacrament,” was the reply. “Oh, very well,” said Paracelsus, “if he has another physician he has no need of me.” I think Operinus wrote in good faith, but the stories of the doctor’s drunkenness must have been exaggerated. It is inconceivable that he could have been so constantlydrunk, and yet always at work. Operinus, it may be added, returned to Basel and set up as a printer, but failed and died in poverty.
Robert Browning’s dramatic poem of “Paracelsus” has been much praised by the admirers of the poet. It was written when Browning was 23, and represents in dramatic form the ambitious aspirations of a youth of genius who believes he has if mission in life; has intellectual confidence in his own powers; and the assurance that it is the Deity who calls him to the work.