Antidotus Acharistos, which means unthanked antidote, is stated to be so named because it cured so quickly that patients were not sufficiently grateful. They did not realise how bad they might have been without it.
An electuary said to have been prescribed for King David for his melancholy was composed of aloes, opium, saffron, lign-aloes, myrrh, and some other spices, made up with honey. A Sal Sacerdotale (salt combined with a few spices) stated to have been used by the prophets in the time of Elijah had come down to this Antidotary through St. Paul.
Raymond Lully.
The life of Raymond Lully is so romantic that it is worth telling, though it only touches pharmaceutical history occasionally. Born at Palma, in the island of Majorca, in 1235, in a good position of life, he married at the age of twenty-two, and had two sons and a daughter. But home life was not what he desired, and he continued to live the life of a gallant, serenading young girls, writing verses to them, and giving balls and banquets, to the serious derangement of his fortune. Ultimately he conceived a violent passion for a beautiful and virtuous married woman named Ambrosia de Castello who was living at Majorca with her husband. She, to check this libertine’s ardour, showed him her breast, ravaged by cancer. This so afflicted him that he set himself to study medicine with the object of discovering a cure for the cruel disease. With the study of medicine and of alchemy he now associated an insatiable longing for the deliverance of the world from Mohammedan error. He renounced the world, including it would seem his wife and children (though it is recorded that he first shared his possessions with his wife), and went to live on a mountain in a hut which he built with his own hands. This career, however, did not promise an early enough extirpation of infidels, so before long Lully is found travelling, and residing at Paris, Rome, Vienna, Genoa, Tunis, and in other cities, preaching new crusades, importuning the Pope to establish new orders of missionary Christians, and at intervals writing books on medicine. He had invented a sort of mathematical scheme which in his opinion absolutely proved the truth of Christianity, and by the use of diagrams he hoped to convert the Saracens. His ideas are set forth, if not explained, in his Ars Magna. In the course of his strange life he visited Palestine and Cyprus, and at Naples in 1293 he made the acquaintance of Arnold de Villanova. This learned man taught Lully much, and found a fervent discipline in him. He was more than seventy when, according to tradition, he travelled to London with the object of urging on Edward III a new war against the Saracens. Edward alleged his want of means, but Lully was prepared to meet the difficulty, and some of the historians of the science of the period assert that he coined a lot of gold for the purpose of the new crusade. Edward promptly used this money for the war with France, in which he was more interested. Disappointed and disgusted, Lully left England, and some time after, at the age of seventy-eight, set out to visit Jerusalem. Having accomplished that journey he visited several of the cities of North Africa on his way back, and at Bougia, after preaching with his usual vehemence against the Mohammedan heresy, he was stoned by the Moors and left for dead. Some friendly merchants took his body on their ship bound for his native Majorca. He revived, but died on the voyage in his eightieth year, A.D. 1415. His tomb is still shown in the church of San Francisco in the City of Palma.
Raymond Lully.
(From a portrait in the Royal Court and State Library, Munich.)
Raymond Lully is particularly famous in pharmaceutical history for the general use of the aqua vitae or aqua ardens which he introduced. He had learned the process of distilling it from wine from Arnold of Villanova, who had himself probably acquired it from the Arab chemists of Spain, but Lully discovered the art of concentrating the spirit by means of carbonate of potash. Of the aqua vitae which he made he declared that “the taste of it exceedeth all other tastes, and the smell of it all other smells.”