GOLD AS REMEDY IN DISEASES:
null -J.C.Burnett
Few things affect mankind in more ways or more than the subject of this essay. But few of the drugs in our pharmacopoeia possess such remarkable remedial properties; none are in general less known or less appreciated by both physician and patient than this metal in its physiological and therapeutical effects upon the human body.
This arises largely because-the metal being insoluble in its ordinary form-it is taken for granted that it cannot possess any remedial virtues.
But I shall hope to show in the course of these pages that Gold may be so subdivided that it becomes operative upon the living tissue of the body, and thus acquires medicinal properties of the highest order, and that, not merely in some functional disturbances of the organs and their parts, but also in states of deep-seated pathological changes that constitute complaints usually termed organic.
The various phases of thought in medicine have produced views of drugs and drug-action that differ widely from one another; it some a drug simply cures because it is endowed with remedial virtues.... quia est in eo vertus dormitiva, as Moliere has it. Some consider that there are substances that are of a benign and kindly nature, and are present in creation only to be remedies for our diseases, which really-
-amounts to the same thing; while other substances are in themselves hurtful to our bodies, simply, and altogether bad. In one word, there are good and evil substances considered in relation to our bodies; the good ones to heal, the bad ones to hurt.
But Nature is not thus childishly constituted; the same substance is either good, bad, or indifferent, according to how it is used, and according to the state of aggregation of its parts.
Two equivalents of hydrogen and one of oxygen, as water, will quench our thirst, act as a solvent to our food, with a few other constituents float about in our bodies as blood. Hail, ice, sleet, and snow are also only hydrogen and oxygen in the same proportion; they are practically only water, just the same as the steam that whirls us along in the train. we are not astonished at these things; the most marvellous things cease to excite wonder after we have grown accustomed to them.
Tell the noble savage that snow, hail, ice, water, and steam are chemically the same, though physically and dynamically so different, and he will not fail to laugh at your ignorance ! He knows better. Tell the mediocre medical mind that common table- salt* may be so subdivided by means of friction that it thereby becomes a most powerful and even dangerous plus drug, and he will not fail to laugh at you! He knows better. Tell the same that Gold may be so subdivided by simple friction that it becomes an active remedy, second to none in its great power, and the same result follows; he laughs at you. He knows better. It is true he never tried, but he knows., But who should be angry at the poor savage for that he knoweth nought of? Civilisation will teach the untutored mind of the savage what difference of temperature and pressure may effect in the physical state of water-if he survive long enough.
The advance of general and medical knowledge will teach the untutored medical mind (car il y a beaucoup de docteurs qui ne sont point doctes), what trituration will do in the way of transforming a non-medicinal substance into a potent remedy, but it will, probably, not be the medical mind of the crude chirurgeons of the present day. They know better.
The subject we wish to introduce is, "Gold: as a Remedy in Disease, notably in (some forms of) Organic Heart-Diseases, Angina Pectoris, Melancholy, tedium Vita, Scrofula, syphilis, Skin Disease, and as an Antidote to the Ill Effects of Mercury."
We will try to keep to our text.
It is now admitted on all sides that a true and thorough knowledge of a medicine can be obtained in only one way, viz., by first testing it on the healthy.
Why? Because if you give a sick person, X, a dose of medicine of any kind, and there follow, say, six phenomena, how many and which of these were due to the drug, and how many and which were due to the disease? You cannot tell, and therefore you give it to a healthy person to find out.
Suppose we give thirty grains of powdered ipecacuanha root to a healthy person, we find it produces vomiting. That is a symptom of Ipecacuanha; all the symptoms produced by a drug on a healthy person constitute the pathogenesis, or proving, of that drug.
When we know all the physiological effects of a given drug, that is, its pathogenesis, we have a firm scientific basis to work upon. This pathogenetic material constitutes the means of curing disease by using it on the now well-known, but ill- comprehended, principle of similars.
But therefore coming to this point, it is, to say the least, very interesting to cast a glance back into the history of a drug to see what was thought of it by our fathers that have gone before us, and by our forefathers in the old times before them. By this means we learn the empirical uses of a drug, and can compare notes over to the majority, and thus we can satisfy ourselves whether they were right or wrong, and whether we know more than they knew on the subject, or whether indeed they knew many a useful thing that we have allowed to lapse into disuse or even oblivion. Therefore I shall treat my subject some what historically, and expect to show that all the medical wisdom we were to possess on this subject did not originate with us of this generation.
If we have the history of the subject in a few outlines-just a silhouette-then the effects on the healthy, or pathogenesis, also only in outline, and then a few experiments on animals, we shall be able to fully appreciate that to which all this is only preliminary and introductory, viz., Gold as a remedy in disease.
To begin, then, with the first:-
The history of Gold begins very early in the records of our race; it is the first metal discovered by man, and also the first metal mentioned in the Bible.
The eleventh verse of the second chapter of Genesis reads: "The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is Gold." Thus it is noticed even before Eve was created. This is noticed even before Eve was created. This is, of course, some thousands of years ago. I need therefore not state that a complete history of Gold lies beyond the scope of this little work. The great Linne (Mat.Med.) writes its history in four words: Vis politica, usus oeconomicus.
I propose going a little further than this.
Magpies, crows and other thieving birds are attracted by its colour and its sheen, and hence a state of man in which Gold is unknown is hardly conceivable.
The first metallic instruments were made of Gold (Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie).
In the 25th chapter of Exodus there is an account of dishes, spoons, bowls, etc., made of this metal, as every one knows.
The first trituration of Gold was made by Moses out of the remains of the golden calf of the Israelites, and he made the children of Israel drink it in water (Exodus, chap. xxxii. v.20). Hence it is also the first Aurum potabile on record.
What the precise object of Moses was in thus dealing with the remains of the golden calf may be fit matter for discussion; certainly a more efficient way of proving the nullity of a god could not be well devised. What the opinions of Biblical scholars on the subject may be I do not know. In medical works I have read the opinion that the golden calf was really made of wood, and only encases with Gold, and that causing the children of Israel to drink it was with the view of purifying them of their great sin of worshipping an idol.
Gold is constantly connected with the idea of purity and purification, as witness the expression, "Pure as gold."
At the risk of being irksome and of appearing pedantic, I shall give the sources of my information in many instances, and sometimes even give the original text when I think it best.
The first notice of Gold as a medicine known to me is that in Wiegleb's "kritische Untersuchung der Alchemie, Weimar,1777), p. 185, where he treats of the antiquity of chemistry amongst the Chinese, and according to which Gold was used by them medically 2500 B.C. I sometimes wonder how much blague is contained in these pretensions of the Chinese to such great antiquity.
All along the march of time, physicists have been seeking a Perpetuum mobile, mathematicians have been squaring the circle, and husbandmen trying to manure without dung; what wonder, then, that alchemists should have sought the philosopher's stone, and physicians a never-failing panacea!
Gold has more than once figured as the universal cure-all, as a veritable elixir vita, and it will indeed cure many disease, as has been long known, and as I hope to show, but it has never been known to cure chrysodypsia; at any rate I know of no such case on record.
It is wonderfully strange to read of the doings of the curious craft of alchemists, and nowhere more strange than in the works of that erratic genius and honest man Hohenheim, commonly called Paracelsus.
But, withal, the transmutation of common metals into gold and silver, and the discovery of the true lapis philosophorum, run like a thread through them all. That such a gestation should have eventuated in the birth of chemistry is only another proof that good comes of all honest work. The alchemists called Gold the king of metals, rex metallorum, and the sun,Sol. We may fairly invert it, and say it is the metal of kings. The Greek avpov is parent of the Latin aurum, and of the French or; the more usual Greek word is X pvoos. Dioscorides and Avicenna employed Gold as a remedy in the metallic state. Paracelsus used it with sublimate as a universal panacea, and called this calcinatio et solutio " solis."
For years I have tried to fix the date at which Gold was first used as an anti-syphilitic, but I must confess that I have been unable to do so.
It is pretty sure than Hahnemann thus used it, as it is so evidently Homoeopathic to some cases of this disease, but it did not originate with this great man.
Dr. Richard Hughes, in his remarkable work, "Pharmacodynamics", seems to ascribe it to Chretien (meaning evidently Chrestien), but Chrestien certainly did not originate it. What Chrestien did would seem to be this, he first started a would-be new method of cure, "Methode par Absorption," very early in this century, and then this became, "Methode jatraleptice" (de l, an xii), and then (I 8 II), "De la methode jatraleptique, etc., et sur un nouveau remade dans le traitement des maladies veneriennes et lymphatiques." He met with violent opposition from the profession, which had long abandoned the use of Gold in medicine (the ancient Pulvis Auri, Tinctura Auri, Aurum-- potabile, Aurum potabile verum, Tinctura Solis, Tinctura aurea, etc.), it having been so highly prized and praised by the alchemists, and long been the stock-in-trade of secret-mongers and quacks of all kinds, that it passed from being the remade a la mode into utter oblivion. This is the rock upon which lawless therapy has always stranded; at first a given drug is a "new remedy," then it is a wonderful medicine and then a universal panacea, then it is not such a very good medicine after all, and finally it is accounted no good at all, is abandoned like an old mine, and venturous spirits set out in quest of another "new remedy," and so on in a veritable vicious circle.
Few things affect mankind in more ways or more than the subject of this essay. But few of the drugs in our pharmacopoeia possess such remarkable remedial properties; none are in general less known or less appreciated by both physician and patient than this metal in its physiological and therapeutical effects upon the human body.
This arises largely because-the metal being insoluble in its ordinary form-it is taken for granted that it cannot possess any remedial virtues.
But I shall hope to show in the course of these pages that Gold may be so subdivided that it becomes operative upon the living tissue of the body, and thus acquires medicinal properties of the highest order, and that, not merely in some functional disturbances of the organs and their parts, but also in states of deep-seated pathological changes that constitute complaints usually termed organic.
The various phases of thought in medicine have produced views of drugs and drug-action that differ widely from one another; it some a drug simply cures because it is endowed with remedial virtues.... quia est in eo vertus dormitiva, as Moliere has it. Some consider that there are substances that are of a benign and kindly nature, and are present in creation only to be remedies for our diseases, which really-
-amounts to the same thing; while other substances are in themselves hurtful to our bodies, simply, and altogether bad. In one word, there are good and evil substances considered in relation to our bodies; the good ones to heal, the bad ones to hurt.
But Nature is not thus childishly constituted; the same substance is either good, bad, or indifferent, according to how it is used, and according to the state of aggregation of its parts.
Two equivalents of hydrogen and one of oxygen, as water, will quench our thirst, act as a solvent to our food, with a few other constituents float about in our bodies as blood. Hail, ice, sleet, and snow are also only hydrogen and oxygen in the same proportion; they are practically only water, just the same as the steam that whirls us along in the train. we are not astonished at these things; the most marvellous things cease to excite wonder after we have grown accustomed to them.
Tell the noble savage that snow, hail, ice, water, and steam are chemically the same, though physically and dynamically so different, and he will not fail to laugh at your ignorance ! He knows better. Tell the mediocre medical mind that common table- salt* may be so subdivided by means of friction that it thereby becomes a most powerful and even dangerous plus drug, and he will not fail to laugh at you! He knows better. Tell the same that Gold may be so subdivided by simple friction that it becomes an active remedy, second to none in its great power, and the same result follows; he laughs at you. He knows better. It is true he never tried, but he knows., But who should be angry at the poor savage for that he knoweth nought of? Civilisation will teach the untutored mind of the savage what difference of temperature and pressure may effect in the physical state of water-if he survive long enough.
The advance of general and medical knowledge will teach the untutored medical mind (car il y a beaucoup de docteurs qui ne sont point doctes), what trituration will do in the way of transforming a non-medicinal substance into a potent remedy, but it will, probably, not be the medical mind of the crude chirurgeons of the present day. They know better.
The subject we wish to introduce is, "Gold: as a Remedy in Disease, notably in (some forms of) Organic Heart-Diseases, Angina Pectoris, Melancholy, tedium Vita, Scrofula, syphilis, Skin Disease, and as an Antidote to the Ill Effects of Mercury."
We will try to keep to our text.
It is now admitted on all sides that a true and thorough knowledge of a medicine can be obtained in only one way, viz., by first testing it on the healthy.
Why? Because if you give a sick person, X, a dose of medicine of any kind, and there follow, say, six phenomena, how many and which of these were due to the drug, and how many and which were due to the disease? You cannot tell, and therefore you give it to a healthy person to find out.
Suppose we give thirty grains of powdered ipecacuanha root to a healthy person, we find it produces vomiting. That is a symptom of Ipecacuanha; all the symptoms produced by a drug on a healthy person constitute the pathogenesis, or proving, of that drug.
When we know all the physiological effects of a given drug, that is, its pathogenesis, we have a firm scientific basis to work upon. This pathogenetic material constitutes the means of curing disease by using it on the now well-known, but ill- comprehended, principle of similars.
But therefore coming to this point, it is, to say the least, very interesting to cast a glance back into the history of a drug to see what was thought of it by our fathers that have gone before us, and by our forefathers in the old times before them. By this means we learn the empirical uses of a drug, and can compare notes over to the majority, and thus we can satisfy ourselves whether they were right or wrong, and whether we know more than they knew on the subject, or whether indeed they knew many a useful thing that we have allowed to lapse into disuse or even oblivion. Therefore I shall treat my subject some what historically, and expect to show that all the medical wisdom we were to possess on this subject did not originate with us of this generation.
If we have the history of the subject in a few outlines-just a silhouette-then the effects on the healthy, or pathogenesis, also only in outline, and then a few experiments on animals, we shall be able to fully appreciate that to which all this is only preliminary and introductory, viz., Gold as a remedy in disease.
To begin, then, with the first:-
The history of Gold begins very early in the records of our race; it is the first metal discovered by man, and also the first metal mentioned in the Bible.
The eleventh verse of the second chapter of Genesis reads: "The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is Gold." Thus it is noticed even before Eve was created. This is noticed even before Eve was created. This is, of course, some thousands of years ago. I need therefore not state that a complete history of Gold lies beyond the scope of this little work. The great Linne (Mat.Med.) writes its history in four words: Vis politica, usus oeconomicus.
I propose going a little further than this.
Magpies, crows and other thieving birds are attracted by its colour and its sheen, and hence a state of man in which Gold is unknown is hardly conceivable.
The first metallic instruments were made of Gold (Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie).
In the 25th chapter of Exodus there is an account of dishes, spoons, bowls, etc., made of this metal, as every one knows.
The first trituration of Gold was made by Moses out of the remains of the golden calf of the Israelites, and he made the children of Israel drink it in water (Exodus, chap. xxxii. v.20). Hence it is also the first Aurum potabile on record.
What the precise object of Moses was in thus dealing with the remains of the golden calf may be fit matter for discussion; certainly a more efficient way of proving the nullity of a god could not be well devised. What the opinions of Biblical scholars on the subject may be I do not know. In medical works I have read the opinion that the golden calf was really made of wood, and only encases with Gold, and that causing the children of Israel to drink it was with the view of purifying them of their great sin of worshipping an idol.
Gold is constantly connected with the idea of purity and purification, as witness the expression, "Pure as gold."
At the risk of being irksome and of appearing pedantic, I shall give the sources of my information in many instances, and sometimes even give the original text when I think it best.
The first notice of Gold as a medicine known to me is that in Wiegleb's "kritische Untersuchung der Alchemie, Weimar,1777), p. 185, where he treats of the antiquity of chemistry amongst the Chinese, and according to which Gold was used by them medically 2500 B.C. I sometimes wonder how much blague is contained in these pretensions of the Chinese to such great antiquity.
All along the march of time, physicists have been seeking a Perpetuum mobile, mathematicians have been squaring the circle, and husbandmen trying to manure without dung; what wonder, then, that alchemists should have sought the philosopher's stone, and physicians a never-failing panacea!
Gold has more than once figured as the universal cure-all, as a veritable elixir vita, and it will indeed cure many disease, as has been long known, and as I hope to show, but it has never been known to cure chrysodypsia; at any rate I know of no such case on record.
It is wonderfully strange to read of the doings of the curious craft of alchemists, and nowhere more strange than in the works of that erratic genius and honest man Hohenheim, commonly called Paracelsus.
But, withal, the transmutation of common metals into gold and silver, and the discovery of the true lapis philosophorum, run like a thread through them all. That such a gestation should have eventuated in the birth of chemistry is only another proof that good comes of all honest work. The alchemists called Gold the king of metals, rex metallorum, and the sun,Sol. We may fairly invert it, and say it is the metal of kings. The Greek avpov is parent of the Latin aurum, and of the French or; the more usual Greek word is X pvoos. Dioscorides and Avicenna employed Gold as a remedy in the metallic state. Paracelsus used it with sublimate as a universal panacea, and called this calcinatio et solutio " solis."
For years I have tried to fix the date at which Gold was first used as an anti-syphilitic, but I must confess that I have been unable to do so.
It is pretty sure than Hahnemann thus used it, as it is so evidently Homoeopathic to some cases of this disease, but it did not originate with this great man.
Dr. Richard Hughes, in his remarkable work, "Pharmacodynamics", seems to ascribe it to Chretien (meaning evidently Chrestien), but Chrestien certainly did not originate it. What Chrestien did would seem to be this, he first started a would-be new method of cure, "Methode par Absorption," very early in this century, and then this became, "Methode jatraleptice" (de l, an xii), and then (I 8 II), "De la methode jatraleptique, etc., et sur un nouveau remade dans le traitement des maladies veneriennes et lymphatiques." He met with violent opposition from the profession, which had long abandoned the use of Gold in medicine (the ancient Pulvis Auri, Tinctura Auri, Aurum-- potabile, Aurum potabile verum, Tinctura Solis, Tinctura aurea, etc.), it having been so highly prized and praised by the alchemists, and long been the stock-in-trade of secret-mongers and quacks of all kinds, that it passed from being the remade a la mode into utter oblivion. This is the rock upon which lawless therapy has always stranded; at first a given drug is a "new remedy," then it is a wonderful medicine and then a universal panacea, then it is not such a very good medicine after all, and finally it is accounted no good at all, is abandoned like an old mine, and venturous spirits set out in quest of another "new remedy," and so on in a veritable vicious circle.
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