The Anatomy of Melancholy

He condemns potable gold and attacks it because of the corrosive liquids used in it, an argument our Dr Gwinne brings against Dr Anthony. Erastus concludes that their philosophers’ stones, potable gold and the like are “no better than poison,” a mere fraud, a nonentity. This splendid golden stone has presumably been dug out of that pregnant mountain “where a ridiculous mouse will be born.”

On the other side, Paracelsus and his chemical followers, like so many Prometheuses, will fetch fire from heaven and cure every kind of disease with minerals, counting them the only true medicine. Paracelsus calls Galen, Hippocrates and all their followers children, ignoramuses, sophists and so forth: “Away, I beg you, with those who disparage these transformations of Vulcan, offspring of ignorance, pupils of supine obstinacy,” and so on. Without these remedies, they are unworthy of the name of physicians.

He boasts that with these remedies he can make a person live 160 years, or until the world’s end: their antidotes, panaceas, mummy preparations, weapon salve and similar magnetic cures; the lamp of life and death, Diana’s bath, balsam, magical-medical electrum, martial amulets and so on. What will he and his followers not accomplish?

He further boasts that he was “the foremost of physicians” and achieved more famous cures than all the other physicians in Europe: “a drop of his preparations would go further than a dram or an ounce of theirs”—those loathsome, nauseating, filthy potions, irregular pills, as he calls them, horse medicines “at the sight of which the Cyclops Polyphemus would shudder.”

Although some condemn their practice and magnetic cures as tending towards magical superstition, witchcraft, charms and so forth, they nevertheless admire them, stoutly defend them and prefer them beyond measure. But both sides go to extremes. Those who take a middle course approve of minerals, though not so extravagantly.

Lemnius, book 3, chapter 6, On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, commends gold used internally and externally, as in rings, and considers it excellent in medicines. Wecker, Special Antidotary, book 1, recommends it in mixtures for melancholy patients. Renodaeus agrees, book 2, chapter 2; so do Ficino, book 2, chapter 19; Fernel, Method of Medicine, book 5, chapter 21, on heart remedies; Daniel Sennert, book 1, part 2, chapter 9; Audernacus, Libavius, Quercetanus, Oswald Croll, Euonymus, Rubeus and Mattioli in the fourth book of his Letters; and Andreas à Blawen, in a letter to Mattioli. It was praised and used earlier by Avicenna, Arnoldus and many others.

In the same place Mattioli approves of potable gold, mercury and many similar chemical preparations. He goes so far in approving them as to maintain that “no one can be an excellent physician without some skill in chemical distillation, and chronic diseases can scarcely be cured without mineral medicines.” Look for antimony among purgatives.