Part 25

Besides, his work furnishes evidence that the investigating spirit was abroad just when it is usually supposed not to have been, for the Thuringian monk surely did not do all his investigation alone, but must have owed, as well as given, many a suggestion to his contemporaries.

Some ten years ago, when Sir Michael Foster, professor of physiology in the University of Cambridge, England, was invited to deliver the Lane Lectures at the Cooper Medical College in San Francisco, he took for his subject "The History of Physiology." In the course of his lecture on "The Rise of Chemical Physiology" he began with the name of Basil Valentine, who first attracted men's attention to the many chemical substances around them that might be used in the treatment of disease, and said of him:

"He was one of the alchemists, but in addition to his inquiries into the properties of metals and his search for the philosopher's stone, he busied himself with the nature of drugs, vegetable and mineral, and with their action as remedies for disease. He was no anatomist, no physiologist, but rather what nowadays we should call a pharmacologist. He did not care for the problem of the body, all he sought to understand was how the constituents of the soil and of plants might be treated so as to be available for healing the sick and how they produced their effects. We apparently owe to him the introduction of many chemical substances, for instance of hydrochloric acid, which he prepared from oil and vitriol of salt, and of many vegetable drugs. And he was apparently the author of certain conceptions which, as we shall see, played an important part in the development of chemistry and of physiology. To him, it seems, we owe the idea of the three 'elements,' as they were and have been called, replacing the old idea of the ancients of the four elements--earth, air, fire, and water. It must be remembered, however, that both in the ancient and the new idea the word 'element' was not intended to mean that which it means to us now, a fundamental unit of matter, but a general quality or property of matter. The three elements of Valentine were: (1) sulphur, or that which is combustible, which is changed or destroyed, or which at all events disappears during burning or combustion; (2) mercury, that which temporarily disappears during burning or combustion, which is dissociated in the burning from the body burnt, but which may be recovered, that is to say, that which is volatile, and (3) salt, that which is fixed, the residue or ash which remains after burning."

It is a little bit hard in our time for most people to understand just how such a development of thoroughly scientific chemical notions, with investigations for their practical application, should have come before the end of the Middle Ages. This difficulty of understanding, however, we are coming to realize in recent years, is entirely due to our ignorance of the period. We have known little or nothing about the science of the Middle Ages, because it was hidden away in rare old books, in rather difficult Latin, not easy to get at, and still less easy to understand always, and we have been prone to conclude that since we knew nothing about it, there must have been nothing. Just inasmuch as we have learned something definite about the medieval scholars, our admiration has increased. Professor Clifford Allbutt, the Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, in his Harveian Oration, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 1900, on "Science and Medieval Thought" (London, 1901), declared that "the schoolmen, in digging for treasure, cultivated the field of knowledge even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin." He might have added that they had laid foundations in all our modern sciences, in chemistry quite as well as in astronomy, physiology, and the medical sciences, in mathematics and botany.

In chemistry the advances made during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were, perhaps, even more noteworthy than those in any other department of science. Albertus Magnus, who taught at Paris, wrote no less than sixteen treatises on chemical subjects, and, notwithstanding the fact that he was a theologian as well as a scientist, and that his printed works fill some _fifteen folio volumes_, he somehow found the time to make many observations for himself, and performed numberless experiments in order to clear up doubts. The larger histories of chemistry accord him his proper place, and hail him as a great founder in chemistry, and a pioneer in original investigation.

Even St. Thomas of Aquin, much as he was occupied with theology and philosophy, found some time to devote to chemical questions. After all, this is only what might have been expected of the favorite pupil of Albertus Magnus. Three treatises on chemical subjects from Aquinas' pen have been preserved for us, and it is to him that we are said to owe the use, in the Western world at least, of the word amalgam, which he first employed in describing various chemical methods of metallic combination with mercury that were discovered in the search for the genuine transmutation of metals.

Albertus Magnus' other great scientific pupil, Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan friar, followed more closely in the scientific ways of his great master, devoting himself almost entirely to the physical sciences. Altogether he wrote some eighteen treatises on chemical subjects. For a long time it was considered that he was the inventor of gunpowder, though this is now known to have been introduced into Europe by the Arabs. Roger Bacon studied gunpowder and various other explosive combinations in considerable detail, and it is for this reason that he obtained the undeserved reputation of being an original discoverer in this line. How well he realized how much might be accomplished by means of the energy stored up in explosives, can, perhaps, be best appreciated from the fact that he suggested that boats would go along the rivers and across seas without either sails or oars, and that carriages would go along the streets without horse or man power. He considered that man would eventually invent a method of harnessing these explosive mixtures, and of utilizing their energies for his purposes without danger. It is curiously interesting to find, as we begin the twentieth century, and gasolene is so commonly used for the driving of automobiles and motor boats, and is being introduced even into heavier transportation as the most available source of energy for suburban traffic, at least, that this generation should only be fulfilling the idea of the old Franciscan friar of the thirteenth century, who prophesied that in explosives there was the secret of eventually manageable energy for transportation purposes.

Succeeding centuries were not as fruitful in great scientists as the thirteenth, and yet, in the second half of the thirteenth, there was a Pope, John XXI, who had been a physician and professor of medicine before his election to the Papacy, three of whose scientific treatises--one on the transmutation of metals, which he considers an impossibility, at least as far as the manufacture of gold and silver was concerned; a treatise on diseases of the eyes, to which good authorities have not hesitated to give lavish praise for its practical value, considering the conditions in which it was written; and, finally, his treatise on the preservation of the health, written when he was himself over eighty years of age--are all considered by good authorities as worthy of the best scientific spirit of the time.

During the fourteenth century, Arnold of Villanova, the inventor of nitric acid, and the two Hollanduses, kept up the tradition of original investigation in chemistry. Altogether there are some dozen treatises from these three men on chemical subjects. The Hollanduses particularly did their work in a spirit of thoroughly frank, original investigation. They were more interested in minerals than in any other class of substances, but did not waste much time on the question of transmutation of metals. Professor Thompson, the professor of chemistry at Edinburgh, said, in his "History of Chemistry," many years ago, that the Hollanduses give very clear descriptions of their processes of treating minerals in investigating their composition, and these serve to show that their knowledge was by no means entirely theoretical, or acquired only from books.

It is not surprising, then, to have a great investigating pharmacologist come along sometime about the beginning of the fifteenth century, when, according to the best authorities, Basil Valentine was born. From traditions he seems to have had a rather long life, and his years run nearly parallel with his century. His career is a typical example of the personally obscure and intellectually brilliant lives which the old monks lived. Probably in nothing have recent generations been more deceived in historical matters than in their estimation of the intellectual attainments and accomplishment of the old monks. The more that we know of them, not from second-hand authorities, but from their own books and from what they accomplished in art and architecture, in agriculture, in science of all kinds, the more do we realize what busy men they were, and appreciate what genius they often brought to the solution of great problems. We have had much negative pseudo-information brought together with the definite purpose of discrediting monasticism, and now that positive information is gradually being accumulated, it is almost a shock to find how different are the realities of the story of the intellectual life during the Middle Ages from what many writers had pictured them.

To those who may be surprised that a man who did great things in medicine should have lived during the fifteenth century, it may be well to recall the names and a little of the accomplishment of the men of this period, who were Basil Valentine's contemporaries, at least in the sense that some portion of their lives and influence was coeval with his. Before the end of this century Columbus had discovered America, and by no happy accident, for many men of his generation did correspondingly great work. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had developed mathematics and applied mathematical ideas to the heavens, so that he could announce the conclusion that the earth was a star, like the other stars, and moved in the heavens as they do. Contemporary with Cusanus was Regiomontanus, who has been proclaimed the father of modern astronomy, and a distinguished mathematician. Toscanelli, the Florentine astronomer, whose years run almost parallel with those of the fifteenth century, did fine scholarly work, which deeply influenced Columbus and the great navigators of the time. The universities in Italy were attracting students from all over Europe, and such men as Linacre and Dr. Caius went down there from England. Raphael was but a young man at the end of the century, but he had done some noteworthy painting before it closed. Leonardo da Vinci was born just about the middle of the century, and did some marvellous work before the end of that century. Michael Angelo was only twenty-five at the close of the century, but he, too, did fine work, even at this early age. Among the other great Italian painters of this century are Fra Angelico, Perugino, Raphael's master, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, the pupil of his uncle, Vasari, almost as distinguished, Botticelli, Titian, and very many others, who would have been famous leaders in art in any other but this supremely great period.

It was not only in Italy, however, that there was a wonderful outburst of genius at this time, for Germany also saw the rise of a number of great men during this period. Jacob Wimpheling, the "Schoolmaster of Germany," as he has been called, whose educational work did much to determine the character of German education for two centuries, was born in 1450. Rudolph Agricola, who influenced the intellectual Europe of this time deeply, was born in 1443. Erasmus, one of the greatest of scholars, of teachers, and of controversialists, was born in 1467. Johann Reuchlin, the great linguist, who, next to Erasmus, is the most important character in the German Renaissance, was born in 1455. Then there was Sebastian Brant, the author of "The Ship of Fools," and Alexander Hegius, both of this same period. The most influential of them all, Thomas a Kempis, who died in 1471, and whose little book, "The Following of Christ," has influenced every generation deeply ever since, was probably a close contemporary of Basil Valentine. When one knows what European, and especially German scholars, were accomplishing at this time, no room is left for surprise that Basil Valentine should have lived and done work in medicine at this period that was to influence deeply the after history of medicine.

Most of what Basil Valentine did was accomplished in the first half of the fifteenth century. Coming, as he did, before the invention of printing, when the spirit of tradition was more rife and dominating than it has been since, it is almost needless to say that there are many curious legends associated with his name. Two centuries before his time, Roger Bacon, doing his work in England, had succeeded in attracting so much attention even from the common people, because of his wonderful scientific discoveries, that his name became a byword, and many strange magical feats were attributed to him. Friar Bacon was the great wizard, even in the plays of the Elizabethan period. A number of the same sort of myths attached themselves to the Benedictine monk of the fifteenth century. He was proclaimed in popular story to have been a wonderful magician. Even his manuscript, it was said, had not been published directly, but had been hidden in a pillar in the church attached to his monastery, and had been discovered there after the splitting open of the pillar by a bolt of lightning from heaven. It is the extension of this tradition that has sometimes led to the assumption that Valentine lived in an earlier century, some even going so far as to say that he, too, like Roger Bacon, was a product of the thirteenth century. It seems reasonably possible, however, to separate the traditional from what is actual in his existence, and thus to obtain some idea at least of his work, if not of the details of his life. The internal evidence from his works enables the historian of science to place his writing within half a century of the discovery of America.

One of the myths that have gathered around the name of Basil Valentine, because it has become a commonplace in philology, has probably made him more generally known than any of his actual discoveries. In one of the most popular of the old-fashioned text-books of chemistry in use about half a century ago, in the chapter on antimony, there was a story that students, if I may judge from my own experience, never forgot. It was said that Basil Valentine, a monk of the Middle Ages, was the discoverer of this substance. After having experimented with it in a number of ways, he threw some of it out of his laboratory one day when the swine of the monastery, finding it, proceeded to gobble it up, together with some other refuse. Just when they were finishing it, the monk discovered what they were doing. He feared the worst from it, but took the occasion to observe the effect upon the swine very carefully. He found that, after a preliminary period of digestive disturbance, these swine developed an enormous appetite, and became fatter than any of the others. This seemed a rather desirable result, and Basil Valentine, ever on the search for the practical, thought that he might use the remedy to good purpose on the members of the community. Some of the monks in the monastery were of rather frail health and delicate constitution, and most of them were rather thin, and he thought that the putting on of a little fat, provided it could be accomplished without infringement of the rule, might be a good thing for them. Accordingly, he administered, surreptitiously, some of the salts of antimony, with which he was experimenting, in the food served to these monks. The result, however, was not so favorable as in the case of the hogs. Indeed, according to one, though less authentic, version of the story, some of the poor monks, the unconscious subjects of the experiment, perished as the result of the ingestion of the antimonial compounds. According to the better version, they suffered only the usual unpleasant consequences of taking antimony, which are, however, quite enough for a fitting climax to the story. Basil Valentine called the new substance which he had discovered antimony, that is, _opposed to monks_. It might be good for hogs, but it was a form of monks' bane, as it were.[30]

Unfortunately for most of the good stories of history, modern criticism has nearly always failed to find any authentic basis for them, and they have had to go the way of the legends of Washington's hatchet and Tell's apple. We are sorry to say that that seems to be true also of this particular story. Antimony, the word, is very probably derived from certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is no more derived from _anti_ and _monachus_ than it is from _anti_ and _monos_ (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found alone in nature.

Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact that Valentinus--to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly designated in foreign literatures--was one of the great geniuses, who, working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the uses of medicine. It is said to have been because of the study of Basil Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, and began our modern pharmaceutics. Following Paracelsus came Van Helmont, the father of modern medical chemistry, and these three did more than any others to enlarge the scope of medication and to make observation rather than authority the most important criterion of truth in medicine. Indeed, the work of this trio of men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the Renaissance in medicine as in art--dominated medical treatment, or at least the department of pharmaceutics, down almost to our own day, and their influence is still felt in drug-giving.

While we do not know the absolute data of either the birth or the death of Basil Valentine and are not sure of the exact period even in which he lived and did his work, we are sure that a great original observer about the time of the invention of printing studied mercury and sulphur and various salts of the metals, and above all introduced antimony to the notice of the scientific world, and especially to the favor of practitioners of medicine. His book, "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony," is full of conclusions not quite justified by his premises nor by his observations. There is no doubt, however, that the observational method which he employed furnished an immense amount of knowledge, and formed the basis of the method of investigation by which the chemical side of medicine was to develop during the next two or three centuries. Great harm was done by the abuse of antimony, but then great harm is done by the abuse of anything, no matter how good it may be. For a time it came to be the most important drug in medicine and was only replaced by venesection.

The fact of the matter is that doctors were looking for effects from their drugs, and antimony is, above all things, effective. Patients, too, wished to see the effect of the medicines they took. They do so even yet, and when antimony was administered there was no doubt about its working.

The most interesting of Basil Valentine's books, and the one which has had the most enduring influence, is undoubtedly "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony."[31] It has been translated and has had a wide vogue in every language of modern Europe. Its recommendation of antimony had such an effect upon medical practice that it continued to be the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia down almost to the middle of the nineteenth century. If any proof were needed that Basil Valentine or that the author of the books that go under the name was a monk it would be found in the introduction to this volume, which not only states that fact very clearly, but also in doing so makes use of language that shows the writer to have been deeply imbued with the old monastic spirit. I quote the first paragraph of this introduction because it emphasizes this. The quotation is taken from the English translation of the work as published in London in 1678. Curiously enough, seeing the obscurity surrounding Valentine himself, we do not know for sure who made the translation. The translator apologizes somewhat for the deeply religious spirit of the book, but considers that he was not justified in eliminating any of this. The paragraph is left in the quaint, old-fashioned form so eminently suited to the thoughts of the old master, and the spelling and use of capitals is not changed.

"Basil Valentine: His Triumphant Chariot of Antimony.--Since I, Basil Valentine, by Religious Vows am bound to live according to the order of St. Benedict and that requires another manner of Spirit of Holiness than the common state of Mortals exercised in the profane business of this World; I thought it my duty before all things, in the beginning of this little book, to declare what is necessary to be known by the pious Spagyrist [old-time name for medical chemist], inflamed with an ardent desire of this Art, as what he ought to do, and whereunto to direct his striving, that he may lay such foundations of the whole matter as may be stable; lest his Building, shaken with the Winds, happen to fall, and the whole Edifice to be involved in shameful Ruine which otherwise being founded on more firm and solid principles, might have continued for a long series of time. Which Admonition I judged was, is and always will be a necessary part of my religious Office; especially since we must all die, and no one of us which are now, whether high or low, shall long be seen among the number of men. For it concerns me to recommend these Meditations of Mortality to Posterity, leaving them behind me, not only that honor may be given to the Divine Majesty, but also that men may obey him sincerely in all things.

"In this my meditation I found that there were five principal heads, chiefly to be considered by the wise and prudent spectators of our Wisdom and Art. The first of which is Invocation of God. The second, Contemplation of Nature. The third, True Preparation. The fourth, the Way of Using. The fifth, Utility and Fruit. For he who regards not these, shall never obtain place among true Chymists, or fill up the number of perfect Spagyrists. Therefore, touching these five heads, we shall here following treat and so far declare them, as that the general Work may be brought to light and perfected by an intent and studious Operator."