The Mystery and Romance of Alchemy and Pharmacy

by C. J. S. Thompson

In the thirteenth century an advance was made in materia medica by Gilbert and Hernicus Arviell, two Englishmen who travelled through Asia to study plants and their uses. Simon de Cordo, called Simon of Genoa, also took a botanising exploration into Sicily and the islands of the Archipelago, and afterwards wrote a botanic dictionary.

Another eminent botanist of this period was Peter de Crescenzi, a man of good birth and fortune, who was born at Bologna in 1330, and who greatly interested himself in botany and horticulture. His great work, which was translated into several languages, was called Opus Rubarium Commodorum. Contemporary with Peter were three names we must not omit, viz., Vincent de Beauvais, Albertus Magnus, and Arnaud de Villeneuve, who professed a knowledge of alchemy, astrology, and physic. Vincent de Beauvais was a Dominican monk, and his great work, the Speculum Naturale, is saturated with the superstition of the time. In this book he states, “the mandragora is of the same shape as the human body; the winged dragon is capable of carrying off an ox, and devouring the same whilst flying”. He also describes the scythion lamb, a sort of animal plant which had roots and grew in the ground, and other fearsome creatures, and declared that “in Scotland the fruits of certain trees, when they fall into the water, produce the birds called black divers”. Villeneuve wrote many treatises on plants and animals, and eventually became teacher of medicine and botany at the University of Paris. He was undoubtedly a man in advance of his time, and boldly declared “that the most solemn mysteries of the Catholic faith could be explained by the teachings of natural history and experimental physics”.

He was therefore accused by the magistrates of sorcery and magic, but escaped through the special protection of Charles of Anjou into Italy, where he settled for a long time.

The fourteenth century saw little advance in the medical art, but it was enriched by one or two great works. One of these, written in Latin by Bartholomew Glanvil, an English monk, was a kind of encyclopædia of immense size, and was called Liber de Proprietatibus Rerum, and had a great reputation for centuries afterwards.

The advent of printing about the middle of the fifteenth century rapidly spread the knowledge of more recent discoveries throughout Europe, and many large works on botany and herbalism, illustrated with woodcuts, were published at Mayence and Louvain. At Venice many of the works of the old Arab physicians, Avicenna, Mesué, and others, were printed and eagerly purchased. The discovery of America in 1492 heralded the introduction of numerous fresh additions to materia medica, which were brought to this country by explorers and naturalists.

In the sixteenth century, by the labours and researches of George Agricola, a German, and Conrad Gesner, a Swiss, a considerable advance was made in the knowledge of what was called chemical medicine and botany. Agricola, who was the greatest mineralogist the world had then seen, explored and spent much time in the mines of Bohemia and Saxony, and thus obtained a practical knowledge of the then known methods of the working of metals. His contemporary, Conrad Gesner, born at Zurich in 1516, has been called the originator of scientific botany, as he was the first to discover a method of recognising each genus and kind by examining the organs of fructification, and in this way discovered 1800 new varieties. A famous physic garden was planted in Paris in the early part of the seventeenth century by Jacques Gohory, an enthusiastic pharmacist, and this garden eventually became part of the Jardin des Plantes. In connection with this garden a school of medicine was founded, the first occupant of the chair of chemistry being William Davisson, a Scotchman, and predecessor to Lefebvre, who afterwards became a chemist at St. James’s.

The practice of the teachers of this time was to dictate to their students, and in order to save themselves the trouble of dictating and the students the trouble of writing, which was a very laborious matter in those days, the lecturer would write a book. Thus Jean Beguin wrote a chemical text-book in 1612, which passed through no fewer than fifty-three editions.

We must not omit to mention two other pioneers of this period, who made important discoveries in botany; they were Matthias of Lille, who eventually settled in England, and Andrew Cesalpin, professor of botany at Pisa. The former first formulated the true principles of classification of plants and arrangement into families, such as the orchids, palms, and mosses; and to the latter belongs the honour of having devised the first system of botany. Having compared the process of generation in animals to the seeds of plants, he distinguished male plants by their stamens, and those which yielded seed as female.

The next era is marked by the publication of the first pharmacopœia at Nuremberg in 1542. “For this act,” says Paris, “we are indebted to Valerius Cordus, a young student, who, during a transient visit at that place, accidentally produced a collection of medical receipts which he had selected from the works of the past esteemed writers, and with which the physicians of Nuremberg were so highly pleased that they urged him to print it for the benefit of the apothecaries, and obtained the sanction of the Senate to the undertaking.” To this slight circumstance we owe the institution of pharmacopœias. The first London Pharmacopœia was, however, not published until the reign of James I., in 1618, of which there were twelve subsequent editions, the last being in 1841. The Dublin Pharmacopœia first appeared in 1807, the last edition being published in 1850. Until the Medical Act passed in 1858, the right of publishing the Pharmacopœia for England, Scotland, and Ireland was vested in the College of Physicians of London, Edinburgh, and Ireland respectively; and as these books contained several preparations similar in name and different in strength, such obvious danger arose for travellers that the British Pharmacopœia, published in 1864, became, by Act of Parliament, the standard for Great Britain and Ireland.