Robert Boyle, writing in 1663, attempts to show that the theory of the therapeutic action of precious stones is not incompatible with observed facts.
Whether the somewhat mysterious illness and death of the popes Leo IV and Paul II could have been caused by the great quantity of pearls and precious stones they were in the habit of wearing was a question seriously discussed by Johann Wolff, the supposed lethal effect being attributed to the coldness of such objects.
Indeed, the frigidity of precious stones was adduced by certain writers as one of the chief reasons for their remedial use in fevers.
Not only to King Frederick III of Denmark himself, to whom on his death-bed in 1670, a dose of pulverized bezoar was administered, but to his queen and their children such remedies were given, there being record that on September 19, 1663, a prescription containing red coral and pearl powder was compounded by the Court Pharmacy for the queen, while a few years earlier the inevitable bezoar and also a tonic pearl-milk were administered to some of the royal offspring.
Some interesting details as to the use of precious stone remedies for the cure of illness appear in the manuscript notes of lectures given at the Leyden Hospital by the seventeenth century physician, Lucas Schacht in 1674 and 1675.
This shows that these remedial agents were there and at that time only used as a last resort, when the patient’s condition had become desperate and the physician is usually obliged to record the fact that death ensued shortly afterwards.
Thus we are told of the case of a certain Ludovicus Carels who was suffering from difficulty of breathing and purulent expectoration.
His body was so distended that he could scarcely move his limbs and he also had a severe diarrhcea. This was his condition on November 12, 1674, and the symptoms steadily grew worse under a treatment of herb decoctions, until a few days later, on Novonber 21, it is noted that “he only thinks of death.”
Still the doctors waited until November 24 before they decided to administer a compound remedy consisting in part of the elixirs of jacinth and pearl; three days later the patient died. In general the chief symptoms which justified the use of such remedies were those of high fever or great weakness.
Although by the middle of the eighteenth century the belief in the special curative powers of precious stone material had almost entirely disappeared giving place to a more scientific conception of the chemical composition of these bodies, still, we find, even in so capable a writer as the German mineralogist, U. F. B. Bruckmann, a lingering trace of the old idea, for while he declares that all intelligent physicians have abandoned their use, he adds, “if, however, any stone of this kind has more effect than an ordinary earthy substance, it is the lapis lazuli, but we have a hundred other remedies equally efficacious and much cheaper. ”
He also testifies to the fact that very little genuine material was to be had from the apothecaries, he himself having often seen a yellow feldspar offered instead of a jacinth, and poor garnets as substitutes for rubies.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a famous cordial medicine, called “Gascoign’s Powder,” after the physician who compounded it, had an immense vogue in England.
It is stated to have contained Oriental bezoar (the most important ingredient), white amber, red coral, crab’s eyes, powdered hartshorn, pearl and black crab’s claws certainly a most incongruous mixture and one well calculated to test the resisting powers of the person to whom it was administered.
A modem writer finds in the homeopathic theory of medicine an explanation of the apparent therapeutic effects of precious stones.
For if the smaller the dose the greater the effect, then such super-subtle emanations as are thought to proceed from precious stones must have effects still more powerful than those of the most highly diluted tinctures administered by homeopathists of the old school Christian Science, however, with its bold denial of the existence of disease, and with Its purely spiritual treatment of the “mental error” that is supposed to be at the root of all morbid symptoms, could even more easily account for the apparent cures wrought by merely wearing precious stones. The belief in their remedial virtue would serve to remove the morbid impression, and would restore the mind to its normal and healthy state.
An instance from our own day of the application of a mineral substance externally for the cure of disease, appears in the use of the uranium pitchblende occurring in Bohemia, This is enclosed in leather bags and applied to the head for the cure of headache. The most violent pains are said to be relieved in a short time by this treatment, the effect being produced by the radium contained in the pitchblende.
