In September last year, I heard of the Amsterdam Ritman Library or Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica for the first time. I had been wanting to see the exhibition ‘Alchemy on the Amstel‘ (until 20 September 2013) ever since, and last week I finally got a chance. On a sunny afternoon I cycled to the library, hidden away in a side street of the Prinsengracht, a stone’s throw from the Westerchurch.

In stark contrast to the hustle and bustle outside, just metres away from the throngs of tourists queuing for the Anne Frank house, the Ritman Library is an oasis of silence. Founded by the Amsterdam businessman and maecenas Joost R. Ritman (1941), the library holds a unique collection of hermetic books and manuscripts with a focus on the Christian tradition. The collection covers areas as diverse as alchemy, Rosicrucian works and Gnostics, from the Middle Ages to the present day.

The current exhibitions at the Ritman Library, ‘Alchemy on the Amstel: On Hermetic Medicine in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic’ and ‘A Curious Tsar: Peter the Great and Discovering the Secrets of Nature in Amsterdam’ (in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Peter the Great: an Inspired Tsar’ in the Amsterdam Hermitage), are small but rich. They give the visitor a quick but thorough insight in Amsterdam as a centre of trade and knowledge in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Concise bilingual catalogues help the visitor to put the works on display in context.

Although this is a library exhibition, there are not just manuscripts, books, and other printed works on display. In one of the display cases, a small cup and a stony clump of material with a metal-like shimmer caught my eye. They turned out to be an antimony cup and a lump of antimony (Sb₂S₃), a lustrous grey metalloid often found in ores together with either sulphur or mercury. This combination appealed to alchemists, as sulphur and mercury were considered the basic alchemical elements. Moreover, as antimony could cleanse the most precious metal, gold, from impurities, alchemists reasoned it could also cleanse and cure God’s most precious creature, created after his own image: man.

Hence Paracelsus (1493-1541) and many of his followers advocated the use of small amounts of antimony in iatrochemical drugs, although they were well aware of the fact that it is highly poisonous. Antimony cups like the seventeenth-century one on display at the Ritman library were used since antiquity to make antimonial wine by soaking regular wine in it for one or more days. This antimonial wine was a tried emetic, but antimony cups were forbidden in England and France for much of the seventeenth century as the use of a wine too acidic would result in a lethal concoction. This prohibition was sometimes circumnavigated by creating antimony cups from tin with a small amount of antimony.[1] In France antimony cups became legal once more in 1658, after Louis XIV was cured from typhoid fever with antimonial wine.[2]

The aim of this this exhibition, dispelling some of the misconceptions surrounding alchemy with a general audience, is certainly met. And for historians of alchemy and chemistry, the Ritman Library is a true treasure trove. Like many other cultural institutions, the library faced major financial challenges over the past years. All the more reason to support it by paying a visit – you will not be disappointed.

 

As regular readers know, I have a weakness for the material culture of early modern science and medicine. There are scores of brilliant museums full of the stuff, but there is a downside: the most common, most intensively used objects tend not to be in museum collections. That makes sense of course: their common and utilitarian character meant they were discarded when broken, damaged, or no longer in use. Most of the spaces in which these objects were used are long gone too: they were continuously modernized, or given a new destination and transformed beyond recognition. Unfortunately, that means that in some instances, such as that of the early modern laboratory, hardly anything of a material culture remains. There are some rare exceptions, and an exciting project based at UCL studies the archaeological remains of early modern laboratories.

However, my current research focuses on the Low Countries, and as far as I know, no laboratory has been dug up here so far. What remains are individual flasks, bottles, jars and retorts. Fortunately, the (ideal) lay-out of early modern chemical laboratories and their inventories in the Netherlands have been mapped in print to some extent. Take for example Steven Blankaart’s 1678 De nieuwe hedendaagsche stof-scheiding ofthe chymia (The new contemporary separation of substances or chymia).

Blankaart, an Amsterdam physician and natural philosopher who had started his career as an apothecaries’ apprentice, published this book based on a variety of authors and his own experiences, to advocate chemical experimentation. In it, we find not only detailed descriptions of the properties and processing of all kinds of substances, but also four plates depicting a range of laboratory equipment. Blankaart’s book, written in Dutch, was aimed primarily at professional artisans such as apothecaries, assayers, and artists who made their own pigments. This was a flourishing trade in the early modern period, as also appears from the program of this fascinating conference, which I unfortunately will not be able to attend.

By the late seventeenth century, chemistry was also slowly becoming an academic discipline. In 1669, a chemical laboratory was created at Leiden University. There are no maps or depictions of this laboratory, but it probably looked quite similar to the laboratory installed at Utrecht University in 1695.

That the laboratory in Leiden was used intensively shows from the report written by the newly appointed professor of chemistry Herman Boerhaave in 1718. He proposed to renew the ovens, as almost half a century of intense use had made them unfit, and the curators happily agreed.[1] The lists Boerhaave provided of equipment that had been ‘inherited’ from the previous chemistry professor and of equipment and supplies that had to be purchased give a good idea about the inventory of the laboratory circa 1718: iron rings, hooks, spoons, spatulas, and pliers, copper kettles, bowls and buckets, bellows, a variety of glass flasks and bottles, six brickwork ovens, wood, coal and peat, and a well-instructed laboratory assistant.[2]

To be continued!

In the seventeenth century, Europeans were very interested in the new plant species discovered in faraway regions. In the Netherlands in particular, the spice trade with the East Indies flourished: nutmeg, ginger, pepper and cloves were staples.  However, there were also less common plants. In the letters that the famous Dutch scholar and physician Herman Boerhaave wrote to a friend and colleague in Austria, I noticed several mentions of a root called ‘Ninzin,’ which was extremely rare and expensive. Here’s a translation of what Boerhaave wrote (unfortunately the responses of his friend Bassand were lost):

In many eighteenth-century collections of human anatomy, one or more preparations of animals with cleft palate, a congenital defect still commonly known as harelip, can be found.

A quick exploration of the history of cleft palate tells us more about why these animal preparations were included in collections of human anatomy at a time when comparative anatomy was not a discipline yet. We probably all know or have seen somebody who has a corrected cleft lip, as the incidence is about one in 700 births nowadays, making it fairly common. (In comparison: the incidence for neural tube defects such as spina bifida is one in about 17,000 births, and for anencephaly –the absence of a large part of the brain and the skull- one in 10,000.)

Nowadays cleft palate can be treated successfully, but in the eighteenth century this was not at all the case. Most children born with a severe cleft palate died of malnourishment within weeks because of feeding problems. In less severe cases, sometimes an attempt was made to correct the cleft lip.

However, pre-anaesthetic, this was a rather cruel and potentially traumatizing procedure. The patient was held tight by an assistant, while the surgeon cut open and subsequently stitched together the two halves of the lip with thin needles. The needles then remained in the lip and were taken out one by one over the course of days or even weeks.[1]

Even if the operation was successful, a child with a corrected cleft lip faced a lifelong stigma. Now known to be caused genetic or environmental factors, or a by a combination of both, in the eighteenth century cleft palate was still commonly explained by the theory of maternal imagination.[2] This meant that people believed that birth defects were impressed on the foetus during pregnancy because the mother had seen, imagined, or done something. In the case of cleft palate, explanation varied from the mother having unchaste thoughts to her having had intercourse with the devil. After all, in classic iconography as well as popular believe, the hare represents lust, probably because of its speed of reproduction, and sometimes the devil itself. No wonder many sufferers of cleft palate find the term ‘harelip’ offensive!

Many eighteenth-century anatomists and physicians already realized that it was unlikely that the maternal imagination, or morals for that matter, could influence the foetus. After all, deformations like cleft palate also occurred in animals, which have neither imagination nor reason. To make their point, these men started to collect animals with birth defects that were also found in humans, and they recorded case histories to prove the maternal imagination was a fantasy. For example, Dutch anatomists Eduard Sandifort wrote of a new born girl with a severe cleft palate that she was her parents’ eleventh child, the first with such a defect, and that they were good Christians.[3] However, the idea of the maternal imagination influencing the foetus was hard to eradicate: even in 1889, the authors of an encyclopaedia of children’s diseases still felt it was necessary to note that

“Pre-natal maternal impressions are often claimed as the cause of these marks [birth marks], and many cases are cited which lend a considerable degree of plausibility to the claim. It is more rational, however, to explain these cases by the principle of coincidence.”[4]

 

In my research of early modern chemistry and medicine, I am currently focussing on the use of metals, particularly quicksilver. But other metals were also used widely, and the use of gold and silver is quite fascinating, in particular because it never disappeared entirely. In the late seventeenth century, silver was used to create aqua fortis or strong water, a kind of nitric acid.[1] This was used to treat skin conditions, and to dissolve gold and make dyes.  Silver was also used in medication that was supposed to strengthen the heart, but in 1747, Wouter van Lis refuted this: in his pharmaceutical handbook, he wrote that it is useless to add silver or gold to these drugs, as our body heat is incapable of solving them.

Van Lis had a point indeed: pure metallic silver and gold are not really toxic for the human body, as they are relatively resistant to corrosion by bodily processes. That is why eating small amounts of gold and silver leaf is harmless: European food additives E174 and E175 are simply silver and gold. This decorative use of precious metals was also familiar to Van Lis and his contemporaries: he noted that ‘…sometimes medication, like pills, is covered in silver or gold leave, to make it more pleasant to the eye.’[2] This covering was done in so-called pill silverers: spherical wooden containers on a small foot, into which silver or gold leave was put, moistened pills were added, and gentle swirling produced nicely silver or gold plated pills.

However, this innocuousness only goes for pure metallic precious metals, and not for compounds containing them, such as silver salts and colloidal silver. In the twentieth and twenty-first century, these have been advertised as a cure for a variety of ailments. They are sold as food supplements, thus avoiding the strict regulations that apply to medication. A sustained intake of these silver compounds can lead to argyria or silver poisoning.[3] Although very rare and unlikely to interfere with vital functions, it gives the sufferer an irreversible bluish-silver hue. The most famous recent case is probably Paul Karason, an American man who turned permanently blue after taking large amounts of a home made silver compound to cure his arthritis. Probably not exactly the kind of silver lining you’re looking for in a cure…

Recently, I wrote a blog about the use of human remains in early modern medicine. Humans were indeed not the only living beings that medical men thought to be useful in remedies. When I tried to gain a better understanding of a preparation of a dog with a cleft palate in the eighteenth-century Leiden University anatomical collections, I found an elaborate contemporary piece on the use of dogs in medicine. It had been written by Martinus Houttuyn (1720-1798), a Dutch natural philosopher who used Linneaus’ categorization of plants and animals to write a natural history in Dutch.[1] His work appeared in multiple volumes in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Houttuyn tried to list all the uses of dogs, from hunting, guarding and pulling carts to dinner and medicine. Although he dismissed the eating of dogs as only customary in other parts of the world, dogs could were very useful in medicine. ‘Young Dog Balm’, made out of young dogs boiled in olive oil with herbs and purified dog fat were used as chest relief balms. Small living dogs could be used as a kind of hot-water bag to treat colic pains, and having a dog lick a wound was thought to speed the healing process. The licking of a dog was also a tried cure for gout: having a dog lick the legs of a gout sufferer was likely to kill the dog, but it cured the patient. Similarly (and probably less messy for the client), socks of dog leather could be used to relieve bouts of gout, and gloves of dog skin were beneficial for rheumatic hands. Human skin was would have been even better than dog skin, but as this was scarce and expensive, dog skin was a good alternative.[2]

Dogs were also regularly used as stand-ins for humans in anatomy research, and were used frequently in vivisection experiments, leading Houttuyn to nickname the dog ‘Martyr of the Physicians.’

These examples of how dogs were used in medicine and medical research only two centuries ago demonstrate how culturally defined our relationship with certain kinds of animals is, and that it can change relatively quickly: with the rise of the popularity of the lap dog and the development of bacteriology and a chemical pharmaceutical industry in the nineteenth century, an anti-vivisectionist movement arose, and remedy contents like boiled dogs were not as generally accepted anymore.[3] However, we should not forget that dogs are still important in medical research aimed at developing cures for humans.[4]

For four years, I worked on my PhD dissertation about eighteenth-century anatomical preparations. Those preparations look pretty, many quite fragile, dangling in preservations fluid from a single horsehair in a glass phial. I was particularly interested in why these preparations were made, and how. The ‘why’ question can be answered fairly well by studying the preparations and related sources, such as contemporary letters, books, catalogues and lecture notes. The ‘how’ question though, is a completely different matter. Techniques to create lasting wet anatomical preparations were first developed from the late seventeenth century, and the first anatomists doing so were not too keen on everyone knowing their secret. That way, a good lasting preparation remained a sought after commodity.

Yet this secrecy eventually disappeared as more and more preparations were required for research and teaching, and by the end of the eighteenth century, quite detailed handbooks on making anatomical preparations were available, such as Pole’s 1790 Anatomical Instructor. But does that mean it is easy to understand how an anatomical preparation was made in the eighteenth century? Not at all. Because these handbooks do describe materials and processes, but they also stress that the main things required are practice and patience. They are like cookbooks with very complicated recipes: you can have the book, all the ingredients and equipment described, follow the instructions minutely, and you can still mess up dinner massively because you are an inexperienced cook.

Like any art, any practical skill, creating an anatomical preparation is something you can only do successfully if you practice patiently. To gain a better understanding of this practice, at some point my colleagues and I decided that we had to try to create a preparation ourselves, using the eighteenth-century handbooks and materials that resembled those listed as close as possible. That is how we ended up trying to inject sheep hearts with warm blue and red wax on two February afternoons in early 2012. It turned out to be even harder then we anticipated. The wax had to be very hot in order not to harden straight away, so we kept the hearts in an au-bain-marie, but the water had to be so warm we almost burned our hands. According to the instructions, injecting the wax through particular veins, it should eventually also be pushed into the smallest blood vessels, but whatever we tried, it didn’t happen.

And then I did not even mention the difficulties we had obtaining the right ingredients for the wax masses and mixing them according to the recipes, the stink of the hearts and the hot turpentine, the difficulty we had discerning the right veins for injection and tying of the others to prevent the wax from leaking out again. If we were already having so much trouble doing this in an age of electric lighting, refrigeration, and the internet, how difficult must it have been for an eighteenth-century anatomist? I already admired the old preparations for their refined details, and that admiration only increased because of our own experiment. What this shows is that trying to reproduce historical experiments and production techniques enhances our understanding of historical practices and objects enormously, in a way that is impossible if you only study written and visual sources. Sometimes, history research has to be very hands-on.

In previous posts, I have written about the historical omnipresence of mercury in medicine. For my new research project, I am trying to figure out how the first academic chemists looked at mercury, and whether the experiments they did with it changed the way mercury was used in drugs. In the early eighteenth century, the chemical laboratory was slowly but steadily integrated in university research and teaching. Taking its materials and procedures mostly from traditional alchemy, the early academic chemists tried to distance themselves and their new practice from the negative associations alchemy also included, like quackery and gold making.

The academic chemists wanted to combine laboratory practice and philosophy to gain an better understanding of the composition and characteristics of all kinds of materials, and hoped this would also enable them to improve the effectiveness of medical remedies. For example, the famous Leiden professor of botany, medicine and chemistry Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) spend a substantial part of the last decade of his live experimenting with mercury. He wondered whether purified mercury was the primal matter that could serve as a universal remedy.

Not very surprising, because the actual substance of mercury was thought to have the same qualities as the god Mercury and philosophical mercury, an alchemical concept which was not necessarily the same as the actual material. I know, this sounds vague, and it is – part of my research project is trying to find out whether the early academic chemists actually distinguished between philosophical and material mercury, or that they saw them as interchangeable entities with the same qualities. This multiplicity of mercury is nicely demonstrated in John Woodall’s 1617 The Ships’ Surgeons’ Mate, a handbook for young ships’ surgeons’ with little training on how to dress wounds, use chirurgical instruments and prepare medication.

Apart from these practical instructions, the book also contains two six-page poems, one on the virtues of mercury, and one on those of sulfur – traditionally thought to be the hot, red, dry natural opposite of cool, silvery white, wet mercury. The image of the god mercury shown here precedes the poem on the virtues of mercury, and bears a short caption on the character of Mercury, or mercury:

My shape and habit strange you see,

my actions best can witnesse me;

About the world I take my way,

 with Sol in circuit once a day.

 

From earth to skie with oft returnes,

from substance to a blast;

From good to bad and good againe,

hence winged, I fly in haste.

 

In this text, we see that a number of characteristics of the substance / planet / god are effortlessly combined: the strange shape and habits of the metal that can change from a substance to a vapour, a ‘blast;’ the planet that orbits the sun and is thus circled by earth once a day, and the winged, hastily flying messenger god. Also, it mentions that mercury has a good and a bad side, something that is also stressed in the last verse of the poem on sulfur: “Though Sulphur, Sal and Mercurie, have healing medicines store, yet know the’ have poison and can kill, prepare them well therefore.” To be continued!

In our culture, we have a deeply ingrained aversion against ingesting other people’s bodies and bodily substances. Or don’t we? It seems a bit random, as exchanges of certain bodily fluids between partners are generally accepted as long as it happens in private, as are blood and organ donations. Yet the idea of ingesting (preparations of) human flesh, bones, blood, hair, nails, urine, and other excrements evokes associations with cannibalism, which is a big taboo. However, historically speaking, this aversion is fairly recent and the practical uses of death human bodies were quite varied.

For example, as my colleague Lindsey Fitzharris pointed out on her brilliant blog The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice earlier this year, anthropodermic bibliopegy, or book covers made of human skin were quite mainstream items once, particularly around the French revolution. And it didn’t stop at book covers: up until the eighteenth century, human remains were regularly used in drugs. Richard Sugg wrote a fascinating book about this, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (Routledge, London 2011). Sugg’s work is based mainly on English-language sources, but ‘corpse medicine’ was a phenomenon through all of Europe, and the Low Countries were no exception.

Tim Huisman in his 2009 book on the Leiden anatomical theatre, The Finger of God (Primavera Press, p.50), mentioned that Otto Heurnius (1577-1652), the keeper of the anatomical theatre, was particularly pleased when he obtained an Egyptian mummie in 1620. Not just because it was such a great showpiece, but also because the mummified

human flesh was thought to have great healing qualities – even better than human flesh from Tenerife, Napels or the African desert. According to Heurnius, this was due to the specific mix of spices used in the embalming process.

So I was not entirely surprised this week when I found various recipes listing human bodily tissue in the Collectanea chymica Leidensia (1684, various reprints), a book consisting of drug recipes by Leiden University chemistry professors compiled by an English student. Cadavers, mummie, embryos and human blood are all listed as simplica (base ingredients), apparently without causing any controversy.

The recipe for preparing ‘mummie’ on page 317 in the 1693 edition calls for the flesh of a human who died a violent death (“Carnis hominis, violenta morte perempti”) and the resulting preparation was apparently very helpful in internal lesions, hemorrhaged lungs and ‘marasmo’ or loss of strength, to name a few ailments. Strange as it may sound to us now, the idea was probably that a person who died a violent dead was most likely not very calm at the time of his death, and that this excitement could be preserved in his flesh and subsequently transferred successfully to the body of the patient, where it would have a healing and invigorating effect.

A morbidly fascinating topic, yet the pressing question that is raised by the ubiquitous seventeenth-century drug recipes involving human bodily material is of course: where did it all come from? Obviously there weren’t enough Egyptian mummies around, as the recipe quoted above describes making ‘mummie’ out of the flesh of any person who died a violent death. Sugg suggests convicted criminals, which is a realistic possibility, because they were also used for anatomical demonstrations. However, those were scarce too, and although it is not clear how often human-based drugs were prescribed, it is possible that material was sometimes delivered on demand…