Category Archives: Series: Metals

The (lack of) power of gemstones

By Marieke Hendriksen

The idea of gemstones having curative powers has existed from ancient times until the present day. As I am interested in the use of chemical and mineral substances in eighteenth-century Dutch and particularly Boerhavian medicine, I am currently analysing medical and apothecary handbooks from this period and area to gain an idea of what eighteenth-century Dutch physicians and apothecaries thought of the alleged curative powers of gemstones. Unlike neighbouring countries, the Netherlands has no strong tradition of early modern lapidaries, so I was somewhat surprised to find regular mentions of gemstones in these sources anyway.

Front page of the 1741 Leiden edition of the Medicina Pharmaceutica
Front page of the 1741 Leiden edition of the Medicina Pharmaceutica

A number of examples can be found in a 1741 Dutch apothecary handbook about which I have written before here. It was re-edited by an apothecary, Schróder, and initiated by Boerhaave’s direct successor as professor of chemistry at Leiden University, Jerome Gaub: Medicina pharmaceutica, of Groote algemeene schatkamer der drôgbereidende geneeskonst, originally published by the Flemish apothecary and physician Robertus de Favarques. The new edition of this 1681 work appeared with the Leiden printer Severinus, and was received positively in the press. In De Favarques’/Schróder’s list of simples, an entire section is devoted to metals, minerals, and stones. Not only were the materials listed, but also an overview was given of where they were found and how they could be used in the apothecary shop. From these descriptions, it becomes clear that the powers of some metals and gemstones were still commonly accepted, whereas those of others seem to have fallen into disrepute.

Natural ultramarine pigment, made of powdered lapis lazily. Works a treat if you're feeling blue...
Natural ultramarine pigment, made of powdered lapis lazuli. Works a treat if you’re feeling blue…

Pulverised rock crystal for example is mentioned as a cure for diarrhoea, powdered lapis lazuli is prescribed to strengthen the heart and to alleviate melancholy. However, the authors are more sceptical about the uses of some other stones, especially when worn on the body. The eagle stone – not a true gemstone but some sort of hollow clay stone, is commonly believed to prevent miscarriage when worn around the neck, to ease labour when tied around the calf, and recommended by some in plasters to treat convulsions. However, the handbook warns, they are only good to stop bleeding and diarrhoea when taken in powdered form. Garnet and ruby, although commonly attributed with cordial powers, as well as with the power to ward off melancholy and venom, in this book too serve only in powdered form to curb sharpness in the body, to temper the flow of blood and faeces, and to dry. Similarly, it is said of sapphires that many powers are ascribed to them, which they do not possess, such as cordial, blood cleansing, and other powers. Basically, apart from lapis lazuli, all stones and gemstones in the list only qualify in powdered form as absorbents to stop bleeding and diarrhoea; no other applications are mentioned.

This focus on (gem)stones as only useful in medicine in powdered form to stop all kinds of bodily fluids from flowing freely suggests a strong humoural understanding of the medicinal powers of stones, the dry earthiness of which could temper the wetness of blood and phlegm. Moreover, the list shows a rejection of early modern understandings of (gem)stones as having curative powers from which one could benefit by wearing the stone on the body. Exactly why he seems to have thought lapis lazuli -the only source of expensive ultramarine pigment until the early nineteenth century- was an exception remains a mystery for now, but maybe I will be able to inform you about that in the near future…

Boerhaave’s contemporary fame: a letter from China to recipe books

By Marieke Hendriksen

Herman Boerhaave, J. Chapman, 1798. Source credit: http://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/images/B29694 via Wikimedia Commons.
Herman Boerhaave, J. Chapman, 1798. Source credit: http://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/images/B29694 via Wikimedia Commons.

My current research project focuses on how Herman Boerhaave’s (1668-1738) medical and chemical ideas, particularly those on metals, influenced the theories and practices of his students and other followers. The longer I work on this topic, the more I notice Boerhaave’s general influence on his contemporaries and the next generations. Already during his lifetime, Boerhaave was famous far beyond the borders of the Netherlands, even though he hardly left Leiden and the furthest journey he made during his life was to Harderwijk, a Dutch town about 100km from Leiden, where he gained his doctorate. A popular (alhough never documented) story told that a letter sent from China, addressed simply to ‘the illustrious prof. Boerhaave, physician in Europe,’ reached him without delay.

Then there was Boerhaave’s stove, a small wooden box-like incubator Boerhaave described in one of his text books and which students, apothecaries and amateurs constructed at least till the early nineteenth century to conduct chemical experiments, prepare ingredients for drugs, and even hatch eggs. Another trace of Boerhaave’s influence on Dutch eighteenth-century culture was the continuing description of dark candy sugar as ‘Boerhaave’s sugar,’ because he prescribed it as an ingredient in cough syrups. Yet most clearly of all can his influence be seen in both professional and private eighteenth-century manuscript recipe books.

Brown candy sugar, also known as 'Boerhaave's sugar' in the eighteenth century
Brown candy sugar, also known as ‘Boerhaave’s sugar’ in the eighteenth century. Image credit: © Alice Wiegand / CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Although it may seem obvious that Boerhaave’s medicine influenced that of other medical men, it is interesting to see how diverse his influence was. Lately I compared a number of eighteenth-century Dutch manuscript recipe books and was pleasantly surprised by the different ways in which Boerhaave’s medicine influenced both medical men and others. In an anonymous recipe book that was probably compiled by a medical man of some sort, four recipes are attributed to Boerhaave, and three to his direct successor at Leiden University, Jerome Gaub (1705-1780). That this book was most likely used by a medical professional can be told from the fact that most of the recipes were written down in Latin, and measurements were given in apothecary shorthand, i.e. weights were indicated in drams.[1] Moreover, recipes for analgesics and purges to be used in persistent illnesses such as venereal disease and epilepsy, often accompanied by a note that they are only to be used if all else fails, are dominant, and ingredients like mercury, antimony, and sulphur are frequently listed.

This forms a stark contrast with household recipe books from the same period, like the anonymous ‘Medicamentboek’ that contains recipes attributed to ‘Bourhavi’ [sic] against fever and coughing. The most remarkable difference with the first recipe book is that almost all recipes are in Dutch, and contain primarily readily available ingredients, such as beer, bread, wine, honey, candy sugar, herbs, spices, rhubarb, tongue of veal, red cabbage, liquorice, and vinegar. Moreover, instead of cures for persistent and grave illnesses such as advanced venereal disease, this recipe book lists cures for more common ailments such as dandruff, irritated gums, coughing and winter hands.  Although some recipes in this book have been written in apothecary shorthand, in Latin, or contain more exotic ingredients such as red coral and boiled puppies, these entries are all in a different hand than the bulk of the recipes, suggesting the recipe collector occasionally asked a medical professional to add a recipe to his or her household medical recipes book.[2]

Rather than reading all these attributions to Boerhaave as direct evidence of medical networks, which is problematic, as they do not prove that the compiler had any affiliation with the names source, they can be read as proof of the diverse yet widely dispersed influence of Boerhaave’s medicine in eighteenth-century Dutch society.[3] For medical men, he was a professional example whose recipes, especially the more complicated ones that contained potentially dangerous ingredients such as metals, were collected as a resource for extreme cases. For laymen, Boerhaave’s name and simpler recipes, based on more readily available ingredients and aimed at more common ailments, carried equal authority.


[1] Anonymous. “Receptenboekje”, ca. 1750. Museum Boerhaave Library, Leiden: BOERH a 313.

[2] “Medicament boek : met een recept van Boerhaave tegen koorts”, 17XX. Museum Boerhaave Library, Leiden: BOERH a 308.

[3] For more on interpreting early modern recipe books, see Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, eds. Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550-1800. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Metallic cures: antimonial wine and mineral kermes

By Marieke Hendriksen

In my previous post, I wrote about the ubiquity of mercurial drugs in the long eighteenth century. Mercury is a metal we are all quite familiar with, yet a variety of cures was based on metals and metallic compounds well into the nineteenth century – some of which we hardly hear of anymore today. Drugs based on antimony, a lustrous grey metalloid often found in ores together with either sulfur or mercury, and mineral kermes, a compound of antimony trioxide and trisulfide, were very popular. In universal encyclopedias from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century for example, we find complicated recipes to create mineral kermes, which involve repeated distilling of a mixture of sulfur of antimony, fixed niter or potassium carbonate, and river- or rainwater.[i]

Antimony ore, antimony cup and Basilius Valentinus, Triump-Wagen Antimonii, Leipzig 1604. From: C. van Heertum, Alchemy on the Amstel. On Hermetic Medicine. Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 2012.
Antimony ore, antimony cup and Basilius Valentinus, Triump-Wagen Antimonii, Leipzig 1604. From: C. van Heertum, Alchemy on the Amstel. On Hermetic Medicine. Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 2012.

Although it unlikely anyone tried these recipes at home, the use of antimony and its derivatives had a long tradition. Antimony cups were used since antiquity to make antimonial wine by soaking regular wine in it for one or more days.[ii] The fact that antimony frequently occurred together with mercury or sulphur appealed to alchemists, apothecaries, and other medical men and women, as sulphur and mercury were considered the basic alchemical elements. Moreover, as antimony could cleanse the most precious metal, gold, from impurities, alchemists reasoned it could also cleanse and cure God’s most precious creature, created after his own image: man. Hence Paracelsus (1493-1541) and many of his followers advocated the use of small amounts of antimony in iatrochemical drugs, although they were well aware of the fact that it is highly poisonous.

Antimonial wine thus was a tried emetic, yet antimony cups were forbidden in England and France for much of the seventeenth century, as the use of a wine too acidic would result in a lethal concoction. This prohibition was sometimes circumnavigated by creating antimony cups from tin with a small amount of antimony.[iii] In France antimony cups became legal once more in 1658, after Louis XIV was cured from typhoid fever with antimonial wine.[iv] After this royal endorsement of antimony, men of science started to investigate it more closely than ever before. Between 1700 and 1707 the French chemist Lemery wrote an extensive series of articles on antimony and its medicinal uses for the Académie des Sciences, culminating in a book describing all the changes it underwent by chemical procedures, and how the resulting substances could be used in medicine.[v] The Leiden professor of chemistry Gaub too devoted a substantial part of his lectures on metals on antimony and mineral kermes, extensively discussing the chemical procedures that should be applied to create effective medical materials.[vi]

French Apothecary Bottle: Kermes Mineral, 1880s. Courtesy of Dr Jack Fincham.
French Apothecary Bottle with traces of Kermes Mineral, 1880s. Courtesy of Dr Jack Fincham.

The recipes in the encyclopedias show that mineral kermes was one of the most important medical materials that could be created through chemically treating antimony. As can still be seen in a late nineteenth-centruy French apothecary bottle, it is a reddish brown powder. The powder does not dissolve in water and, like mercury, had a reputation for cleansing the lymphatic vessels, and was also used as an emetic and diaphoretic. The name was probably derived from the Arabic name for a similarly coloured crimson dye made from insects, al-qirmiz. The use of mineral kermes as a drug was apparently first mentioned by Glauber (1604-1670), but how to successfully create it remained a subject of debate into the nineteenth century, even after an official recipe was published by the king of France in 1720.[vii]


[i] De Felice, Fortunato Bartolomeo, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire universel raisonné des connoissances, (Paris, 1773), Vol. 25, p. 345. Wilkes, John, Encyclopaedia Londinensis, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts (London: J. Adlard, 1810), Vol. iv, p. 277.

[ii] Also see one of my previous blogs on The Medicine Chest.

[iii] StClair Thomson, “Antimonyall Cupps: Pocula Emetica or Calices Vomitorii”, Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., Vol. XIX, no. 9, 1925, 123-8.

[iv] C. van Heertum, Alchemy on the Amstel. On Hermetic Medicine. Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 2012, 49.

[v] Lemery, Nicolás, Traité de L’antimoine (Paris: Jean Boudot, 1707).

[vi] Gaub, H.D., ‘Chemiae Praxis. Notes of Lectures by an Unnamed Student. Produced in Leyden.’, Closed stores WMS 4  MS.2479, Wellcome Library Manuscripts, p. 593-685.

[vii] Willich, A.F.M., A Domestic Encyclopedia Or A Dictionary Of Facts, And Useful Knowledge, 3 vols. (London: B. McMillan, 1802), p. 46.

‘Mercurialia are worrisome’: dangerous recipes

By Marieke Hendriksen

To anyone familiar with the practices of Thomas Dover (1662-1742), alias the Quicksilver Doctor, it may seem like mercury and mercury-based drugs were prescribed and taken rather indiscriminately by physicians, apothecaries and patients in the eighteenth century.[i] However, pharmaceutical handbooks, often written by experienced pharmacists under the auspices of university professors of medicine, give an entirely different view. These handbooks, some of which were reprinted in great numbers for decades, were aimed at professional apothecaries and other medical men. Although virtually every pharmaceutical handbook listed mercurial drugs, they all warn against using them too liberally.

Title page of the 1681 edition of the Medicina Pharmaceutica. Credit: Amsterdam University Library.
Title page of the 1681 edition of the Medicina Pharmaceutica. Credit: Amsterdam University Library.

A good example can be found in the four Dutch editions of the Medicina pharmaceutica, or Great general treasury of pharmaceutical medicine, which appeared between 1681 and 1741.[ii] In the first edition, at least nine different recipes involving mercury in some form are listed. Because of mercury’s alleged cleansing and purging properties, these cures were recommended for ailments as diverse as intestinal worms, venereal disease, and skin infections.[iii]

However, in the fifth book of that same edition, the volume on ‘Shop Compositions’ (drugs composed to sell ready made in the apothecaries’ shop), over half a page is spend on a warning about antimonial and mercurial drugs, summarized in the index as ‘Mercurialia zyn sorghelyck,’ which translates as ‘Mercurialia are worrisome.’ Following a list of drugs prepared from a variety of minerals, metals and stones, the author warns that it is not his intention to give the ‘Masters of medicine’ the idea that they should prescribe these dangerous cures often; only when there were no other options left should they revert to them.[iv] The other options, it appears, were mainly traditional herbal remedies, as the author writes:

God almighty has blessed us with some common or native herbs and remedies, that have such a power invested in them, that these can be used in general and without vicissitudes or thinking twice to cure the ill, so one should always use these first, before one turns to some dangerous and strange medicaments from chemistry; so it would be a great deception and recklessness to apply prepared Antimony or Quicksilver, if one is provided with other harmless and powerful remedies, as the former often needlessly do great damage, or could even cause death.[v]

Only if a disease did not respond to the herbal remedies could ‘dangerous chemical preparations’ be applied. As this was the first edition of the Medicina Pharmaceutica from 1681, and the first decades of the eighteenth century saw an increasing incorporation of chemistry in the academy, one might expect that the last edition from 1741 was less tentative about the prescription of chemical remedies.[vi] Previous editions had been printed in Brussels, but the 1741 edition was printed in Leiden–a city with one of the leading medical faculties of Europe at the time. The reprint even had a preface written by the Leiden professor of chemistry Hieronymus Gaub. Although the spelling of the 1741 edition was updated to modern standards, the same old warning was once again repeated.

This raises questions about the extent to which early chemical research and teaching at universities was changing professional medical men’s understanding and application of mercurial, or other chemically-based, remedies. Moreover, the apparent contrast between the cautions and warnings in professional handbooks like these and popular culture on the one hand, and the ostensible popularity of mercury remedies on the other, makes this a fascinating research topic.


[i] Also see Kenneth Dewhurst, The Quicksilver Doctor. The Life and Times of Thomas Dover Physician and Adventurer (Bristol: John Wright & Sons Ltd., 1957).

[ii] Robertus de Farvacques, Medicina pharmaceutica, of Groote algemeene schatkamer der drôgbereidende geneeskonst (Leiden: Isaak Severinus, 1741). De Farvacques, the personal physician of Charles II, was not really the author of this book. His name was used by the actual author, the Brussels friar Peter Gilles, to lend it more authority. See L.J. Vanderwiele, “Broeder Petrus Gillis S.J. (1620-1697), Auteur van Medicina Pharmaceutica of Drogbereidende Geneeskonst”, Kring voor de geschiedenis van de pharmacie in de Benelux. Bulletin. 69 (maart 1986): 8–16.

[iii] Robertus de Farvacques, Medicina pharmaceutica, of Groote algemeene schatkamer der drôgbereidende geneeskonst. (Brussels, Francois Foppens, 1681), Vol. V, 932-5, 951-5.

[iv] Ibid., 967.

[v] Ibid.: ‘Want aengesien Godt almachtigh ons met eenighe ghemeynsaeme, oft inlandtsche heylsaeme kruyden ende drôghen heeft ghejont, die met sulcken kracht zyn begaeft, dat-men ghemeynelyck met de selve sonder peryckel oft achterdencken de siecken kan ghenesen, soo behoort-men altoos eerst de selve the ghebruycken, eer men sich begheeft om eenighe ghevaerlycke ende vremde middelen uyt de schey-konst te nemen; soo dat het een groot bedrogh oft reuckeloosheydt soude wesen, achter den bereyden Antimonie oft Quick in ‘t werck te stellen, soo wanneer men versien is van andere schadeloose ende krachtighe remedien, door dien men also dickmaels sonder noot aen onsen evenaesten groote schade, jae de doodt selfs soude konnen aen-brenghen.’ (Translation mine)

[vi] On the formation of chemistry as an academic discipline in the early eighteenth century see Bruce Moran, Distilling Knowledge. Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), chapter 4.