An early notice of jade as a remedial agent appears in Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of his travels in Guiana. Treating of a people of “Amazons” said to dwell in the interior of the country, Raleigh says:[490]
These Amazones have likewise great store of these plates of golde, which they recover by exchange, chiefly for a kinde of greene stone, which the Spaniards call Piedras Hijadas, and we use for spleene stones and for the disease of the stone we also esteeme them: of these I saw divers in Guiana, and commonly every King or Casique hath one, which theire wives for the most part weare, and they esteeme them as great jewels.
By the middle of the seventeenth century the curative powers of jade for the various forms of calculi was very generally admitted. A singular instance is offered us in one of Voiture’s letters. He was a great sufferer from “the stone” and he had received, from a Mademoiselle Paulet, a beautiful jade bracelet. Gratefully acknowledging the receipt of this peculiar gift, he expresses himself in the following frank way, a mixture of indelicacy and gallantry that seems strange to us: “If the stones you have given me do not break mine, they will at least make me bear my sufferings patiently; and it seems to me that I ought not to complain of my colic, since it has procured me this happiness.” The name used for jade by Voiture, “l’éjade,” supplied a missing link in the derivation of our name jade from the Spanish hijada. When the lady’s gift was received by Voiture, some friends chanced to be present, and they were disposed to regard it as a token of love until he assured them that it was only a remedy. It appears that Mlle. Paulet was a fellow sufferer, and, alluding to this, Voiture writes: “On this occasion the jade had for you an effect you did not expect from it, and its virtue defended your own.”[491]
Renal calculi and poetry do not seem to have much in common, but the following lines freely rendered from an old Italian poem on the subject by Ciri de Pers show that even this unpromising theme is susceptible of poetic treatment:[492]
“Other white stones serve to mark happy days,
But mine do mark days full of pain and gloom.
To build a palace, or a temple fair,
Stones should be used; but mine do serve
To wreck the fleshly temple of my soul.