Part 29

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.

RAYMOND LULLY.

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 the Saracens. His ideas are set forth, if not explained, in his Ars 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.

(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.”

FRASCATOR.

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 Officinal Capitals,” 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 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.

BASIL VALENTINE.

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 might be prescribed. And very wonderful indeed is the chemical knowledge displayed in this and other of Valentine’s writings.

(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 Holiness than 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 sulphur and 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 himself invented. This theory is, however, held by some chemical critics.