The Curious Lore of Precious Stones / Being a description of their sentiments and folk lore, superstitions, symbolism, mysticism, use in medicine, protection, prevention, religion, and divination. Crystal gazing, birth-stones, lucky stones and talismans, astral, zodiacal, and planetary

by George Frederick Kunz

Ruby

Sanskrit medical literature as represented by Naharari, a physician of Cashmere, who wrote in the thirteenth century, finds in the ruby a valuable remedy for flatulency and biliousness. Moreover, aside from these special uses, an elixir of great potency could be made from rubies by those who properly understood the employment of precious stones in the compounding of medicines.[494] This famous “ruby elixir” may have had little in common with the stone except its color, as such remedies were generally said to have been made by some secret and mysterious process, in the course of which all material evidence of the presence of any precious stone or stones completely disappeared.