Part 45

Cream of tartar was known to the ancients under the name of Fæx Vini, which is the designation for it used by Dioscorides.

The tartar of wine was found to be only soluble in water with difficulty; but if boiled in water a turbid liquor was yielded which in the boiled condition continually threw up a sort of skin or scum. This was taken off with a skimmer and dried; it was naturally called Cream of Tartar.

Paracelsus and other chemists distilled this cream and got an oil from it which they called oil or spirit of tartar. It was chiefly a pyro-tartaric acid with some empyreumatic constituents. It was a thin, light yellow, bitter tasting but rather tart, and pleasant smelling oil, and was credited with remarkable penetrating powers. It was used in disorders of the ligaments, membranes, and tendons. Particularly surprising to them was the fact that the residue of a distinctly acid substance was a strong alkali. This “salt of tartar” was found to yield another oil called oleum tartari per deliquium, or lixivium tartari, which was the name by which it was called in the Pharmacopœia. Salt of tartar and cream of tartar together yielded the tartarum tartarisatus. It was when making this that Seignette produced by accident his double tartrate of potash and soda, now familiarly known as Rochelle salt.

VITRIOL.

Visitando Interiora Terræ Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem Veram Medicinam. (Visiting the interior of the earth you may find, by rectifying the occult stone, the true medicine.) This acrostic is first found in the works attributed to Basil Valentine.

The vitriols enjoyed an enormous reputation in medicine, at least until their chemical composition was definitely explained by Geoffrey in 1728. It was certainly known that the green vitriols contained iron, and they were sometimes named vitriol of Mars; that the blue vitriols contained copper, which obtained for them the designation of vitriol of Venus; and the white was understood to be associated with calamine, though by some it was supposed to be only green vitriol which had been calcined.

The name of vitriol cannot be traced further back than to Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century. He expressly applies the term to atramentum viride, the Latin name for sulphate of iron. Presumably it was given to the salt on account of its glassy appearance. The alchemists, on distilling these vitriols found that they always yielded a spirit or oil, to which they naturally gave the name of spirit or oil of vitriol.

In Greek the vitriols were called chalcanthon, as they were extracted from brass; the common name in Latin was atramentum sutorium, because they were employed for making leather black. Dioscorides states that this substance is a valuable emetic, should be taken after eating poisonous fungi, and will expel worms. Pliny recommends it for the cure of ulcers, and Galen used it as a collyrium. There was a good deal of confusion between the vitriols and the alums, and the Greek stypteria and the Latin alumens were often an aluminous earth combined with some vitriol. Pliny gives a test for the purity of what he calls alum, which consists in dropping on it some pomegranate juice, when, he says, it should turn black if it is pure. Evidently his alum contained sulphate of iron.

Paracelsus declared that, with proper chemical management, vitriol was capable of furnishing the fourth part of all necessary medicine. It contained in itself the power of curing jaundice, gravel, stone, fevers, worms, and epilepsy.

Mayerne was another strong advocate of the medicinal virtues of vitriol. According to him it possessed the most diverse properties. It was hot and cold, attenuative and incressant, aperitive and astringent, coagulative and dissolvant, corroborative, purgative, and sudorific.

A multitude of medicines were made from the vitriols. A vitriolum camphoratum was included in the P.L. of 1721 by distilling spirit of camphor from calcined vitriol; but Quincy remarks:--“Its intention I am not acquainted with, nor have ever met with it in prescription.” In Dr. Walter Harris’s “Pharmacopœia Anti-Empirica,” 1683, allusion is made to a remedy made by one Bovius, which consisted of spirit of vitriol, and was designed to lie a universal remedy. Added to an infusion of balm, marjoram, and bugloss, it would cure headache and vertigo; with rose water, fevers; with fumitory water, itch; with fennel water it would restore decayed memory; with plantain water it was a remedy against diarrhœa; and with lettuce water it became a narcotic. “A rare fellow,” quaintly comments the doctor. Homberg’s narcotic salt of vitriol was a combination of green vitriol and borax made after a very complicated process. The Gilla Vitrioli was a purified white vitriol used as an emetic. Spiritus Vitrioli dulcis was an imitation of Hoffmann’s Anodyne. This distilled with hartshorn made the Diaphoretic Vitriol.

One of the precious secrets of the alchemists, occasionally sold to kings and wealthy amateurs, was that of converting iron into copper by means of blue vitriol. A strong solution of the salt was prepared, and an iron blade, or any iron instrument, was immersed in it for a certain time. When taken out it appeared to be a blade or instrument of copper. Kunckel was the first chemist to explain the fallacy.

Elixir of Vitriol was devised by Adrian Mynsicht, a famous German physician, in the early part of the seventeenth century. He published an Armamentarium Medico-Chymicum which became very popular. His Elixir (under the name of Elixir Vitrioli Mynsichti) was first given in the P.L. of 1721 as follows:--cinnamon, ginger, cloves, of each 3 drachms: calamus aromaticus, 1 oz.; galangal root, 1½ oz.; sage, mint, of each ½ oz.; cubebs, nutmegs, of each 2 oz.; lign. aloes, lemon peel, of each 1 drachm; candied sugar, 3 oz. Digest in spirit of wine, 1½ lb., and oil of vitriol 1 lb. for twenty days. Then filter.

In the P.L. 1746 the formula was simplified by mixing 4 oz. of oil of vitriol with 1 lb. of Aromatic Tincture, and the title was changed to Elixir Vitrioli Acidum. In the P.L. 1778 there was no Elixir of Vitriol, dilute sulphuric acid taking its place. This was then called Acidum Vitriolicum Dilutum. Under the name of Acidum Sulphuricum Aromaticum, however, an acidulated tincture, flavoured with ginger and cinnamon, was retained, and this, with the synonym of Elixir of Vitriol, is still in the B.P.

Quincy (1724) states that this medicine had lately come greatly in practice, and deservedly. “It mightily strengthens the stomach,” he says, “and does good service in relaxations from debauches and overfeeding.”

The alga “nostoch,” so-called by Paracelsus, who also described it as flos cœlorum, acquired the name of vegetable vitriol, and sometimes spittle of the stars, because it appeared after rains in places where it had not been seen before.

XIV

MEDICINES FROM THE METALS

Metals are all identical in their essence; they only differ by their form. The form depends on accidental causes which the artist must seek to discover. The accidents interfere with the regular combinations of sulphur and mercury; for every metal is a combination of these two substances. When pure sulphur meets pure mercury, gold results sooner or later by the action of nature. Species are immutable and cannot be transformed from one into the other; but lead, copper, iron, silver, &c., are not species. They only appear to be from their diverse forms. ALBERTUS MAGNUS:--“De Alchemia.” (About 1250.)

ANTIMONY.

Some of the old writers insisted that antimony (the native sulphide) was used as a medicine by Hippocrates who called it Tetragonon, which simply meant four-cornered, and of which we also know that it was made up with the milk of a woman. The reason which the iatro-chemists gave for believing that this compound was made from antimony was worthy of the age when it was the practice to apply enigmatic names to medicinal substances, a practice, however, quite foreign to Hippocrates. They understood the term to imply four natures or virtues, and they said antimony had four virtues, namely, sudorific, emetic, purgative, and cordial; therefore tetragonon meant antimony.

THE ETYMOLOGY OF ANTIMONY.

The name of this metal is one of the curiosities of philology. The old legend was that Basil Valentine, testing his medicine on some of his brother monks, killed a few of them. “Those who have ears for etymological sounds,” says Paris in “Pharmacologia,” “will instantly recognise the origin of the word antimonachos, or monks-bane.” Another version of the monk story is to the effect that after Basil Valentine had been experimenting with antimony in his laboratory he threw some of his compounds out of the window, and pigs came and ate them. He noticed that after the purgative action had passed off the pigs fattened. On this hint he administered the same antimonial preparation to certain monks who were emaciated by long fasts, and they died through the violence of the remedy.

These stories were probably the invention of some French punster, who worked them into shape out of the French name of the substance, antimoine, which, without the change of a letter, might mean bad for the monk. Littré entirely demolished any possibility of their truth by discovering the name in the writings of the Salernitan physician, Constantine, the African, who lived at the end of the eleventh century, three or four hundred years before the earliest dates suggested for Basil Valentine.

Other suggested derivations have been anti-monos, for the reason that the sulphide was never found alone; anti-menein, in reference to its tonic properties; and anti-minium, because it was used as an eye paint in the place of red lead. These are all guesses unsupported by evidence.

The modern philological theory is that the early Latin stibium and the late Latin antimonium have the same etymological origin. Stibium was the Latinised form of the Greek stimmi. Stimmi declined as stimmid--and this may have found its way into the Arabic through a conjectural isthimmid to the known Arabic name uthmud, which via athmud and athmoud became Latinised again into antimonium.

AL-KOHOL.

The antimony known to the ancients as stibium or stimuli was the native sulphide which Eastern women used for darkening their eyelashes. Probably it was used by Jezebel when, expecting Jehu at Samaria, “she painted her eyes and tired her head.” The Hebrew expression is “she put her eyes in paint,” and the Hebrew word for the paint is Phuph; (2 Kings, c. 9, v. 30). In Ezekiel, c. 23, v. 40, a debauched woman is described who painted her eyes, and in this case the Hebrew word employed is Kohol. The Septuagint translated both Phuph and Kohol by stimmi. The method is still used by Arabic women. They have a little silver or ivory rod which they damp and dip into a finely levigated powder called ismed, and draw this between the eyelids. Karrenhappuch, one of Job’s daughters, meant a vessel of antimony. The writer of the Book of Enoch says that the angel Azazel taught the practice to women before the Flood. He “taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and coats of mail, and made known to them metals, and the art of working them; bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyebrows, and the most costly and choicest stones, and all colouring tinctures, so that the world was changed.” Some of the early Christian fathers condemned the vanity. “Inunge oculos non stibio diaboli, sed collyrio Christi,” writes Tertullian.