Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/488

472 Croll then says he has tried almost one hundred different preparations of aurum potabile, and condemns most of them to recommend his own, fulminating gold, called by him "Calx of Sol." His process embraces nauseous ingredients, and the product is, as usual, free from gold.

Paracelsus, the physician who did so much to improve materia medica by introducing chemical medicines, does not neglect gold. Thurneisser, his disciple (both as respects his teachings and his charlatanism), made his royal dupes pay enormous sums for the "tincture of gold" which entered into his extraordinary prescriptions. To the use of royal touch pieces (gold coins) in the reigns of Charles II, James II, and Queen Anne, mere allusion should be made. Christopher Glaser (1663) gives among other preparations a "diaphoretic powder of gold" and prescribes it for continuous or intermittent fevers, the dose being four to twelve grains in wine, or in a spoonful of bouillon. (Traité de la chymie, Paris, 1663.)

Antoine Lecoq (or Gallus), a physician of Paris (1540), seems to have been the first to recommend gold for syphilis. He and his follower Fallopius (of Modena, 1565) described tedious processes for making preparations of gold. These processes were carefully repeated, about the beginning of this century, by Chevallier, a French pharmacist, who declares the products contain no gold at all.

Lamotte's "gold-drops," celebrated throughout Europe for over half a century (1725 to 1780), consisted of a solution of ferric chloride in alcohol; this possessed a yellow color, and was universally regarded as a tincture of gold, until the secret was bought and made public by the Russian Government. (Kopp's Geschichte.)

Frederic Hoffman, a famous German physician (1733), recommends gold for rheumatic fever.

Johann Rudolph Glauber, the German physician whose name is indelibly attached to "Glauber's salts," thought to improve the latter by adding gold. "In all diseases and infirmities, of what name soever, the Spirit or Oil of Salt in which gold is rightly dissolved (or the Aurum Potabile with it), giveth present help, and in all dejections of the vital spirit ... it giveth such relief that life and vigor may be somewhat farther protracted if two, three or four drops be administered as occasion shall serve in good Aqua vitæ or Cordiall Water. In like manner if three drops be administered once a week in generous wine or aqua vitæ, or other fit vehicle, it renovateth a man, makes him youthful, changeth gray hairs, produceth new nails and skin, preserveth from various and divers symptoms of diseases, and preserveth the body in such a state even to the prefixed hour of the Divine appointment."