When Medieval & Early Trendy Europeans Cleansed with Poison: The Unusual Historical past of Antimony Cups and Tablets

The his­to­ry of med­i­cine is, for essentially the most half, a his­to­ry of dubi­ous cures. Some had been even worse than dubi­ous: for examination­ple, the inges­tion of anti­mo­ny, which we now know to be a excessive­ly tox­ic met­al. Although it could not occu­py an exalt­ed (or, for stu­dents in chem­istry class, par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable) place on the peri­od­ic desk at the moment, anti­mo­ny does have a good­ly lengthy cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Its first identified use befell in historic Egypt when stib­nite, one in every of its min­er­al kinds, was floor into the strik­ing­ly darkish eye­lin­er-like cos­met­ic kohl, which was thought to push back dangerous spir­its.

Historical Greek civ­i­liza­tion rec­og­nized anti­mo­ny much less for its results on the spir­it world than on the human one. The Greeks knew full properly that the stuff was tox­ic, but additionally stored return­ing to it as a poten­tial type of med­i­cine.

Historical Rome made its personal prac­ti­cal use of anti­mo­ny, not least in met­al­lur­gy, but additionally stored up cer­tain strains of inquiry into its cura­tive prop­er­ties. As a sub­stance, it was well-placed to cap­ture imag­i­na­tions extra intense­ly within the medieval age of alche­my. By the late sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, peo­ple had been drink­ing wine out of anti­mo­ny cups, as unboxed in the video from the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um above.

“The pur­pose of it’s to attempt to make you vom­it and have diar­rhea and sweat lots,” says Angus Pat­ter­son, the V&A’s senior cura­tor of met­al­work. Within the­o­ry, this may re-bal­ance the “humors” of which medieval med­i­cine con­ceived of the physique as being com­posed. Fan­cy cups just like the one within the video, which was as soon as owned by a lord, weren’t the one anti­mo­ny objects used for this pur­pose: the met­al was additionally solid into so-called “per­pet­u­al drugs,” meant to be swal­lowed, retrieved from the excre­ment, then swal­lowed once more when nec­es­sary — for mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions, in some cas­es, as a form of fam­i­ly inheritor­loom. “Unsure I’d fan­cy swal­low­ing a capsule that had been by my grand­pa,” Pat­ter­son provides, “however wants should when you’ve got a stom­achache in 1750.”

by way of Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hun­dreds of Medieval Med­ical Man­u­scripts with Unusual Cures Get Dig­i­tized & Put On-line: From Leech­es to Crushed Weasel Tes­ti­cles

Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er that Historical Egyp­tians Drank Hal­lu­cino­genic Cock­tails from 2,300 Yr-Previous Mug

The Col­or that Could Have Killed Napoleon: Scheele’s Inexperienced

1,000-Yr-Previous Illus­trat­ed Information to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Crops Now Dig­i­tized & Put On-line

Sir Isaac Newton’s Treatment for the Plague: Pow­dered Toad Vom­it Lozenges (1669)

The Archive of Heal­ing Is Now On-line: UCLA’s Dig­i­tal Knowledge­base Professional­vides Entry to Thou­sands of Tra­di­tion­al & Alter­na­tive Heal­ing Meth­ods

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly generally known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.