Part 26

was at one time in high esteem, as it was believed that by the process adopted for making it the nitre was specially purified. Purified nitre was melted in an iron pot and a little flowers of sulphur (1 oz. to 2 lb.) was sprinkled on it, a little at a time. The sulphur deflagrating was supposed to exercise the purifying influence on the nitre. The actual effect was to convert a small part of the nitrate of potash into sulphate. It was first called Sal Prunella in Germany from the belief that it was a specific against a certain plum-coloured quinsy of an epidemic character. Boerhaave advised the omission of the sulphur, but believed that melting the pure nitre and moulding it was of medicinal value by evaporating aqueous moisture.

Nitre and flowers of sulphur were deflagrated together before the Sal Prunella theory was invented, equal quantities being employed. The resulting combination, which was of course sulphate of potash, was known as Sal Polychrestum, the Salt of Many Virtues.

SAL GEMMÆ.

Sal Gemmæ or Sal Fossile was the name given to rock salt, particularly to the transparent and the tinted varieties. It was believed to be more penetrating than the salt derived from sea water, and this property Lemery ascribed to the circumstance that it had never been dissolved in water, and therefore retained all its native keenness.

SPIRIT OF SALT.

Spiritus Salis Marini Glauberi was one of the products discovered by Glauber, to whom we owe the name of spirit of salt. He was a keen observer and remarked on the suffocating vapour yielded as soon as oil of vitriol was poured on sea-salt. It is astonishing to his biographers that he just missed discovering chlorine. The spirit of salt was highly recommended for many medicinal uses; for exciting the appetite, correcting the bile, curing gangrene, and dissolving stone. Its remarkable property of assisting nitric acid to dissolve gold was soon observed and was attributed to its penetrating power.

TARTAR.

Tartarus was the mythological hell where the gods imprisoned and punished those who had offended them. Virgil represents it as surrounded by three walls and the river Phlegethon, whose waters were sulphur and pitch. Its entrance was protected by a tower wrapped in a cloud three times as black as the darkest night, a gate which the gods themselves could not break, and guarded by Cerberus.

There is nothing to associate this dismal place with the tartar of chemistry, except that in old books it is said that Paracelsus so named the product because it “produces oil, water, tincture, and salt, which burn the patient as Tartarus does.” Paracelsus did not invent the name of tartar; it is found in many alchemical books long before his time. The earliest found use of it is in an alchemical work by Hortulcuus, an English alchemist of the eleventh century.

Paracelsus was writing about “tartarous diseases” (“De Morbis Tartareis”), those, that is, which resulted from the deposit of concretions. Stone, gravel, and gout were among these diseases of tartar, and evidently it was this morbid tartar which he associated with the legendary Tartarus. The word tartar, applied to the deposit from wine, is sometimes supposed to have descended from an Egyptian term, dardarot, meaning an eternal habitation, and etymologists generally prefer it as the origin of the name. If it was, the sense development of the term as applied to the chemical is not clear. The Greek word _tartarizein_, meaning to shiver with cold, does not help much in tracing the history of the word. Another frequently advocated derivation is the Arab, _durd_, dregs, sediment, which it is said was actually applied to the tartar of wine. It appears, too, that the Arabs used this term also as we do to represent the deposit on teeth; they also had a word, _dirad_, to mean a shedding of teeth, and by _darda_ they signified a toothless old woman. Some etymologists consider, however, that the transition from durd to tartar would be most unlikely.

When the alchemists began to experiment with tartar their first process would be to distil it. The residue left in their retorts they called the salt of tartar. They knew this substance under other names, salt of wormwood, for instance, but they did not recognise the identity. By treating tartar with vinegar they produced acetate of potash, which they called regenerated tartar. Oswald Crollius, the compiler of the first European pharmacopœia, gave the name of vitriolated tartar to what we now know as sulphate of potash.

The iatro-chemists of the next century, who obtained it by various methods, gave to sulphate of potash distinct names which show in what esteem it was held. Among other designations it appears as Specificum purgans, Arcanum duplicatum, Nitrum fixum, Panacea holsatica, and Sel de duobus. Glaser, who produced it from sulphur, saltpetre, and urine distilled together, sold it as Sal Polychrest of Glaser.

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.

ALCHEMICAL HOPES OF ANTIMONY.

The alchemists and the early chemical physicians had great hopes of antimony. “They tormented it in every possible manner,” says Fourcroy, “in the hope of getting from it a universal remedy.” With it, too, they were convinced that they were coming near to the transmutation of other metals into gold. Noticing how readily it formed alloys with other metals they named it Lupus Metallorum, the Wolf of Metals. Their process for getting the Powder of Projection, as well as can be gathered from their mystic jargon was to first fuse the crude antimony, the sulphide, with iron which withdrew the sulphur from the antimony. The metal thus obtained they called the Martial Regulus of Antimony. Regulus, or little king, implied an impure gold. Combining this with corrosive sublimate and silver, and subliming the mixture they got the lunar butter of antimony. The sublimation had to be repeated eight or ten times, the residue, or fæces, being added to the sublimate every time. At last the sublimed butter of antimony was transferred to an oval glass vessel capable of containing twelve times its quantity, and hermetically sealed. The Philosophic Egg, as the vessel with its contents was called, was then placed in a sand-bath and kept at a moderate heat for several months. When it had become converted into a red powder, the operation was finished. This powder was the Powder of Projection. It was sprinkled on other metals in a state of fusion, mercury being an ingredient of the fused mass, and yellow gold was produced.

ANTIMONIAL COMPOUNDS.

By other processes the early experimenters obtained various other products. By simply heating crude antimony in a crucible they would sometimes get a vitreous substance in consequence of some of the silica of the crucible combining with the antimony. That was their glass of antimony, which was generally an oxide with some sulphide. In other cases the so-called liver of antimony resulted, a compound containing a larger proportion of the sulphide. This they also called crocus metallorum or saffron of the metals, and one or other of these products was originally the basis of antimonial wine.

It was digested with Rhine wine, and the tartar of the wine formed a tartrate of antimony, but, as may be supposed, the composition of the wine was very variable. Emetic tartar was subsequently substituted for the liver.

The crystalline protoxide of antimony obtained by inflaming, volatilising, and condensing the regulus was known as argentine flowers of antimony. The regulus heated with nitric acid yielded a compound of metal with antimonious acid, and was called mineral bezoar; a compound, really a suboxide, got by fusing sulphide of antimony and nitre was called diaphoretic antimony; the chloride, first made by distilling crude antimony (the native sulphide) with corrosive sublimate, yielded the thick soft butter of antimony; the addition of water to this chemical caused the precipitation of a white oxychloride which was long known as Algaroth’s powder, or mercury of life. It contained no mercury, but was the most popular emetic before the introduction of the tartrate. Victor Algarotti, who introduced it, was a physician, of Verona, who died in 1603. It was alleged that he was poisoned by his local rivals in consequence of the success of his remedy. He was also the inventor of a quintessence of gold.

The regulus of antimony in alloy with some tin was used to make the antimony cups from which antimonial wine originated. It was also made into the pilulæ perpetuæ, or everlasting pills, which, passing through the body almost unchanged, were kept as a family remedy and taken again and again. It is probable that the surface of these pills became slightly oxidised, and consequently acquired a medicinal effect.

KERMES MINERAL.

One of the most famous of the antimony compounds was the kermes mineral, which it is understood was invented by Glauber about 1651. He made it by treating a solution of the oxide of antimony with cream of tartar, and then passing a current of sulphuretted hydrogen through the solution. An orange-red powder was obtained, and famous cures were effected by it. Glauber kept his process secret, but a Dr. de Chastenay learnt it after Glauber’s death from one of his pupils and confided it to a surgeon named La Ligerie, who in his turn communicated it to Brother Simon, a Carthusian monk, who at once commenced successfully to treat his brother monks with it, and soon after the Poudre des Chartres was one of the most popular remedies in France for many serious diseases, small-pox, ague, dropsy, syphilis, and many others. In 1720 Louis XIV bought the formula for its preparation for a considerable sum from La Ligerie. It has been agreed by chemists, Berzelius and others, who have studied Kermes Mineral, that it is a mixture of about 40 per cent. or less of oxide of antimony with a hydrated sulphide of the metal, and a small proportion of sulphide of sodium or potassium (according to the method of preparation). It is still official in the Pharmacopœias of the United States and of many Continental countries.

From the solution from which the Kermes had been deposited a further precipitate was obtained by the addition of hydrochloric acid. This, too, was a mixture, consisting of protosulphide and persulphide of antimony with some sulphur. It was the golden sulphuret which in association with calomel became so noted in the form of Plummer’s powder and Plummer’s pills. The powder was at first known as Plummer’s Æthiops Medicinalis.

It would be tedious to go through the multitude of antimonial compounds which have become official, and it would be impossible in any reasonable space even to enumerate the quack medicines with an antimonial base which were so recklessly sold in this and other countries, especially in the earlier half of the seventeenth century. The most important of all the antimonial compounds, or, at least, the one which has maintained the favour of the medical profession in all countries, is, of course, the tartrate of antimony and potassium, emetic tartar.

EMETIC TARTAR.

Adrian Mynsicht, physician to the Duke of Mecklenburg in the early part of the seventeenth century, is generally credited with the invention of emetic tartar. Certainly the earliest known description of it is found in his “Thesaurus Medico-Chymicum,” published in 1631. But Hofer has pointed out that the mixture known as the Earl of Warwick’s Powder, which consisted of scammony, diaphoretic antimony (a binantimoniate of potash) and cream of tartar, which Cornachinus of Pisa described in 1620, was really its forerunner, and he considers that the salt was recognised in medicine before Mynsicht published his description.

Glauber, in 1648, described the process of making Mynsicht’s emetic tartar from cream of tartar and argentine flowers of antimony.

ANTIMONY CONTROVERSY.