interest in the lives of some of the men, who, dominated by some of the
earlier scholastic ideas, by the tradition of the possibility of finding
the philosopher's stone, which would transmute the baser metals into the
precious metals, devoted themselves with quite as much zeal as any
modern chemist to the observation of chemical phenomena. One of the most
interesting of these--indeed, he might well be said to be the greatest
of the alchemists--is the man whose only name that we know is that which
appears on a series of manuscripts written in the High German dialect of
the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.
That name is Basil Valentine, and the writer, according to the best
historical traditions, was a Benedictine monk. The name Basil Valentine
may only have been a pseudonym, for it has been impossible to trace it
among the records of the monasteries of the time. That the writer was a
monk, however, there seems to be no room for doubt, for his writings
give abundant evidence of it, and, besides, in printed form they began
to have their vogue at a time when there was little likelihood of their
being attributed to a monastic source, unless an indubitable tradition
connected them with some monastery.
This Basil Valentine (to accept the only name we have) did so much for
the science of the composition of substances that he eminently deserves
the designation that has been given him of the last of the alchemists
and the first of the chemists. There is practically a universal
recognition of the fact now that he deserves also the title of the
Founder of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, not only because of the value of
the observations contained in his writings, but also because of the fact
that they proved so suggestive to certain scientific geniuses during the
century succeeding Valentine's life. Almost more than to have added to
the precious heritage of knowledge for mankind, it is a boon for a
scientific observer to have awakened the spirit of observation in
others, and to be the founder of a new school of thought. This Basil
Valentine undoubtedly did, and, in the Renaissance, the incentive from
his writings for such men as Paracelsus is easy to appreciate.
Besides, his work furnishes evidence that the investigating spirit was
abroad just when it is usually supposed not to have been, for the
Thuringian monk surely did not do all his investigation alone, but must
have owed, as well as given, many a suggestion to his contemporaries.
Some ten years ago, when Sir Michael Foster, professor of physiology in
the University of Cambridge, England, was invited to deliver the Lane
Lectures at the Cooper Medical College in San Francisco, he took for his
subject "The History of Physiology." In the course of his lecture on
"The Rise of Chemical Physiology" he began with the name of Basil
Valentine, who first attracted men's attention to the many chemical
substances around them that might be used in the treatment of disease,
and said of him:
"He was one of the alchemists, but in addition to his
inquiries into the properties of metals and his search for the
philosopher's stone, he busied himself with the nature of
drugs, vegetable and mineral, and with their action as
remedies for disease. He was no anatomist, no physiologist,
but rather what nowadays we should call a pharmacologist. He
did not care for the problem of the body, all he sought to
understand was how the constituents of the soil and of plants
might be treated so as to be available for healing the sick
and how they produced their effects. We apparently owe to him
the introduction of many chemical substances, for instance of
hydrochloric acid, which he prepared from oil and vitriol of
salt, and of many vegetable drugs. And he was apparently the
author of certain conceptions which, as we shall see, played
an important part in the development of chemistry and of
physiology. To him, it seems, we owe the idea of the three
'elements,' as they were and have been called, replacing the
old idea of the ancients of the four elements--earth, air,
fire, and water. It must be remembered, however, that both in
the ancient and the new idea the word 'element' was not
intended to mean that which it means to us now, a fundamental
unit of matter, but a general quality or property of matter.
The three elements of Valentine were: (1) sulphur, or that
which is combustible, which is changed or destroyed, or which
at all events disappears during burning or combustion; (2)
mercury, that which temporarily disappears during burning or
combustion, which is dissociated in the burning from the body
burnt, but which may be recovered, that is to say, that which
is volatile, and (3) salt, that which is fixed, the residue or
ash which remains after burning."
It is a little bit hard in our time for most people to understand just
how such a development of thoroughly scientific chemical notions, with
investigations for their practical application, should have come before
the end of the Middle Ages. This difficulty of understanding, however,
we are coming to realize in recent years, is entirely due to our
ignorance of the period. We have known little or nothing about the
science of the Middle Ages, because it was hidden away in rare old
books, in rather difficult Latin, not easy to get at, and still less
easy to understand always, and we have been prone to conclude that since
we knew nothing about it, there must have been nothing. Just inasmuch as
we have learned something definite about the medieval scholars, our
admiration has increased. Professor Clifford Allbutt, the Regius
Professor of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, in his Harveian
Oration, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 1900, on
"Science and Medieval Thought" (London, 1901), declared that "the
schoolmen, in digging for treasure, cultivated the field of knowledge
even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin." He might have added
that they had laid foundations in all our modern sciences, in chemistry
quite as well as in astronomy, physiology, and the medical sciences, in
mathematics and botany.
In chemistry the advances made during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth centuries were, perhaps, even more noteworthy than those in
any other department of science. Albertus Magnus, who taught at Paris,
wrote no less than sixteen treatises on chemical subjects, and,
notwithstanding the fact that he was a theologian as well as a
scientist, and that his printed works fill some _fifteen folio volumes_,
he somehow found the time to make many observations for himself, and
performed numberless experiments in order to clear up doubts. The larger
histories of chemistry accord him his proper place, and hail him as a
great founder in chemistry, and a pioneer in original investigation.
Even St. Thomas of Aquin, much as he was occupied with theology and
philosophy, found some time to devote to chemical questions. After all,
this is only what might have been expected of the favorite pupil of
Albertus Magnus. Three treatises on chemical subjects from Aquinas' pen
have been preserved for us, and it is to him that we are said to owe the
use, in the Western world at least, of the word amalgam, which he first
employed in describing various chemical methods of metallic combination
with mercury that were discovered in the search for the genuine
transmutation of metals.
Albertus Magnus' other great scientific pupil, Roger Bacon, the English
Franciscan friar, followed more closely in the scientific ways of his
great master, devoting himself almost entirely to the physical
sciences. Altogether he wrote some eighteen treatises on chemical
subjects. For a long time it was considered that he was the inventor of
gunpowder, though this is now known to have been introduced into Europe
by the Arabs. Roger Bacon studied gunpowder and various other explosive
combinations in considerable detail, and it is for this reason that he
obtained the undeserved reputation of being an original discoverer in
this line. How well he realized how much might be accomplished by means
of the energy stored up in explosives, can, perhaps, be best appreciated
from the fact that he suggested that boats would go along the rivers and
across seas without either sails or oars, and that carriages would go
along the streets without horse or man power. He considered that man
would eventually invent a method of harnessing these explosive mixtures,
and of utilizing their energies for his purposes without danger. It is
curiously interesting to find, as we begin the twentieth century, and
gasolene is so commonly used for the driving of automobiles and motor
boats, and is being introduced even into heavier transportation as the
most available source of energy for suburban traffic, at least, that
this generation should only be fulfilling the idea of the old Franciscan
friar of the thirteenth century, who prophesied that in explosives there
was the secret of eventually manageable energy for transportation
purposes.
Succeeding centuries were not as fruitful in great scientists as the
thirteenth, and yet, in the second half of the thirteenth, there was a
Pope, John XXI, who had been a physician and professor of medicine
before his election to the Papacy, three of whose scientific
treatises--one on the transmutation of metals, which he considers an
impossibility, at least as far as the manufacture of gold and silver was
concerned; a treatise on diseases of the eyes, to which good authorities
have not hesitated to give lavish praise for its practical value,
considering the conditions in which it was written; and, finally, his
treatise on the preservation of the health, written when he was himself
over eighty years of age--are all considered by good authorities as
worthy of the best scientific spirit of the time.
During the fourteenth century, Arnold of Villanova, the inventor of
nitric acid, and the two Hollanduses, kept up the tradition of original
investigation in chemistry. Altogether there are some dozen treatises
from these three men on chemical subjects. The Hollanduses particularly
did their work in a spirit of thoroughly frank, original investigation.
They were more interested in minerals than in any other class of
substances, but did not waste much time on the question of transmutation
of metals. Professor Thompson, the professor of chemistry at Edinburgh,
said, in his "History of Chemistry," many years ago, that the
Hollanduses give very clear descriptions of their processes of treating
minerals in investigating their composition, and these serve to show
that their knowledge was by no means entirely theoretical, or acquired
only from books.
It is not surprising, then, to have a great investigating pharmacologist
come along sometime about the beginning of the fifteenth century, when,
according to the best authorities, Basil Valentine was born. From
traditions he seems to have had a rather long life, and his years run
nearly parallel with his century. His career is a typical example of the
personally obscure and intellectually brilliant lives which the old
monks lived. Probably in nothing have recent generations been more
deceived in historical matters than in their estimation of the
intellectual attainments and accomplishment of the old monks. The more
that we know of them, not from second-hand authorities, but from their
own books and from what they accomplished in art and architecture, in
agriculture, in science of all kinds, the more do we realize what busy
men they were, and appreciate what genius they often brought to the
solution of great problems. We have had much negative pseudo-information
brought together with the definite purpose of discrediting monasticism,
and now that positive information is gradually being accumulated, it is
almost a shock to find how different are the realities of the story of
the intellectual life during the Middle Ages from what many writers had
pictured them.
To those who may be surprised that a man who did great things in
medicine should have lived during the fifteenth century, it may be well
to recall the names and a little of the accomplishment of the men of
this period, who were Basil Valentine's contemporaries, at least in the
sense that some portion of their lives and influence was coeval with
his. Before the end of this century Columbus had discovered America, and
by no happy accident, for many men of his generation did
correspondingly great work. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had developed
mathematics and applied mathematical ideas to the heavens, so that he
could announce the conclusion that the earth was a star, like the other
stars, and moved in the heavens as they do. Contemporary with Cusanus
was Regiomontanus, who has been proclaimed the father of modern
astronomy, and a distinguished mathematician. Toscanelli, the Florentine
astronomer, whose years run almost parallel with those of the fifteenth
century, did fine scholarly work, which deeply influenced Columbus and
the great navigators of the time. The universities in Italy were
attracting students from all over Europe, and such men as Linacre and
Dr. Caius went down there from England. Raphael was but a young man at
the end of the century, but he had done some noteworthy painting before
it closed. Leonardo da Vinci was born just about the middle of the
century, and did some marvellous work before the end of that century.
Michael Angelo was only twenty-five at the close of the century, but he,
too, did fine work, even at this early age. Among the other great
Italian painters of this century are Fra Angelico, Perugino, Raphael's
master, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, the pupil of his uncle, Vasari, almost
as distinguished, Botticelli, Titian, and very many others, who would
have been famous leaders in art in any other but this supremely great
period.
It was not only in Italy, however, that there was a wonderful outburst
of genius at this time, for Germany also saw the rise of a number of
great men during this period. Jacob Wimpheling, the "Schoolmaster of
Germany," as he has been called, whose educational work did much to
determine the character of German education for two centuries, was born
in 1450. Rudolph Agricola, who influenced the intellectual Europe of
this time deeply, was born in 1443. Erasmus, one of the greatest of
scholars, of teachers, and of controversialists, was born in 1467.
Johann Reuchlin, the great linguist, who, next to Erasmus, is the most
important character in the German Renaissance, was born in 1455. Then
there was Sebastian Brant, the author of "The Ship of Fools," and
Alexander Hegius, both of this same period. The most influential of them
all, Thomas a Kempis, who died in 1471, and whose little book, "The
Following of Christ," has influenced every generation deeply ever since,
was probably a close contemporary of Basil Valentine. When one knows
what European, and especially German scholars, were accomplishing at
this time, no room is left for surprise that Basil Valentine should have
lived and done work in medicine at this period that was to influence
deeply the after history of medicine.
Most of what Basil Valentine did was accomplished in the first half of
the fifteenth century. Coming, as he did, before the invention of
printing, when the spirit of tradition was more rife and dominating than
it has been since, it is almost needless to say that there are many
curious legends associated with his name. Two centuries before his time,
Roger Bacon, doing his work in England, had succeeded in attracting so
much attention even from the common people, because of his wonderful
scientific discoveries, that his name became a byword, and many strange
magical feats were attributed to him. Friar Bacon was the great wizard,
even in the plays of the Elizabethan period. A number of the same sort
of myths attached themselves to the Benedictine monk of the fifteenth
century. He was proclaimed in popular story to have been a wonderful
magician. Even his manuscript, it was said, had not been published
directly, but had been hidden in a pillar in the church attached to his
monastery, and had been discovered there after the splitting open of the
pillar by a bolt of lightning from heaven. It is the extension of this
tradition that has sometimes led to the assumption that Valentine lived
in an earlier century, some even going so far as to say that he, too,
like Roger Bacon, was a product of the thirteenth century. It seems
reasonably possible, however, to separate the traditional from what is
actual in his existence, and thus to obtain some idea at least of his
work, if not of the details of his life. The internal evidence from his
works enables the historian of science to place his writing within half
a century of the discovery of America.
One of the myths that have gathered around the name of Basil Valentine,
because it has become a commonplace in philology, has probably made him
more generally known than any of his actual discoveries. In one of the
most popular of the old-fashioned text-books of chemistry in use about
half a century ago, in the chapter on antimony, there was a story that
students, if I may judge from my own experience, never forgot. It was
said that Basil Valentine, a monk of the Middle Ages, was the discoverer
of this substance. After having experimented with it in a number of
ways, he threw some of it out of his laboratory one day when the swine
of the monastery, finding it, proceeded to gobble it up, together with
some other refuse. Just when they were finishing it, the monk discovered
what they were doing. He feared the worst from it, but took the occasion
to observe the effect upon the swine very carefully. He found that,
after a preliminary period of digestive disturbance, these swine
developed an enormous appetite, and became fatter than any of the
others. This seemed a rather desirable result, and Basil Valentine, ever
on the search for the practical, thought that he might use the remedy to
good purpose on the members of the community. Some of the monks in the
monastery were of rather frail health and delicate constitution, and
most of them were rather thin, and he thought that the putting on of a
little fat, provided it could be accomplished without infringement of
the rule, might be a good thing for them. Accordingly, he administered,
surreptitiously, some of the salts of antimony, with which he was
experimenting, in the food served to these monks. The result, however,
was not so favorable as in the case of the hogs. Indeed, according to
one, though less authentic, version of the story, some of the poor
monks, the unconscious subjects of the experiment, perished as the
result of the ingestion of the antimonial compounds. According to the
better version, they suffered only the usual unpleasant consequences of
taking antimony, which are, however, quite enough for a fitting climax
to the story. Basil Valentine called the new substance which he had
discovered antimony, that is, _opposed to monks_. It might be good for
hogs, but it was a form of monks' bane, as it were.[30]
Unfortunately for most of the good stories of history, modern criticism
has nearly always failed to find any authentic basis for them, and they
have had to go the way of the legends of Washington's hatchet and Tell's
apple. We are sorry to say that that seems to be true also of this
particular story. Antimony, the word, is very probably derived from
certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is
no more derived from _anti_ and _monachus_ than it is from _anti_ and
_monos_ (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation
that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to
consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found alone in
nature.
Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are
associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact that
Valentinus--to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly
designated in foreign literatures--was one of the great geniuses, who,
working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable
humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There
are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first
of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the
old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the
uses of medicine. It is said to have been because of the study of Basil
Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions,
so supreme in medicine up to his time, and began our modern
pharmaceutics. Following Paracelsus came Van Helmont, the father of
modern medical chemistry, and these three did more than any others to
enlarge the scope of medication and to make observation rather than
authority the most important criterion of truth in medicine. Indeed, the
work of this trio of men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the
Renaissance in medicine as in art--dominated medical treatment, or at
least the department of pharmaceutics, down almost to our own day, and
their influence is still felt in drug-giving.
While we do not know the absolute data of either the birth or the death
of Basil Valentine and are not sure of the exact period even in which he
lived and did his work, we are sure that a great original observer about
the time of the invention of printing studied mercury and sulphur and
various salts of the metals, and above all introduced antimony to the
notice of the scientific world, and especially to the favor of
practitioners of medicine. His book, "The Triumphal Chariot of
Antimony," is full of conclusions not quite justified by his premises
nor by his observations. There is no doubt, however, that the
observational method which he employed furnished an immense amount of
knowledge, and formed the basis of the method of investigation by which
the chemical side of medicine was to develop during the next two or
three centuries. Great harm was done by the abuse of antimony, but then
great harm is done by the abuse of anything, no matter how good it may
be. For a time it came to be the most important drug in medicine and was
only replaced by venesection.
The fact of the matter is that doctors were looking for effects from
their drugs, and antimony is, above all things, effective. Patients,
too, wished to see the effect of the medicines they took. They do so
even yet, and when antimony was administered there was no doubt about
its working.
The most interesting of Basil Valentine's books, and the one which has
had the most enduring influence, is undoubtedly "The Triumphal Chariot
of Antimony."[31] It has been translated and has had a wide vogue in
every language of modern Europe. Its recommendation of antimony had such
an effect upon medical practice that it continued to be the most
important drug in the pharmacopoeia down almost to the middle of the
nineteenth century. If any proof were needed that Basil Valentine or
that the author of the books that go under the name was a monk it would
be found in the introduction to this volume, which not only states that
fact very clearly, but also in doing so makes use of language that shows
the writer to have been deeply imbued with the old monastic spirit. I
quote the first paragraph of this introduction because it emphasizes
this. The quotation is taken from the English translation of the work as
published in London in 1678. Curiously enough, seeing the obscurity
surrounding Valentine himself, we do not know for sure who made the
translation. The translator apologizes somewhat for the deeply religious
spirit of the book, but considers that he was not justified in
eliminating any of this. The paragraph is left in the quaint,
old-fashioned form so eminently suited to the thoughts of the old
master, and the spelling and use of capitals is not changed.