The bisulphide of mercury (cinnabar) was also used in many nostrums.
Paris says it was the active ingredient in Chamberlain’s restorative
pills, “the most certain cure for the scrophula, king’s evil, fistula,
scurvy, and all impurities of the blood.”
“KILLING” MERCURY.
The art of extinguishing or “killing” mercury has been discussed and
experimented on from the fifteenth century until the present day.
The modern use of steam machinery in the manufacture of mercurial
ointment, mercurial pills, and mercury with chalk has put a check on
the ingenuity of patient pharmacists, who were constantly discovering
some new method for accelerating the long labour of triturating, which
many operators still living can remember. Venice turpentine, or oil of
turpentine, various essential oils, sulphur, the saliva of a person
fasting, and rancid fat were among the earlier expedients adopted and
subsequently discarded. The turpentines made the ointment irritating,
the sulphur formed a compound, and the rancid fat was found to be worse
than the turpentines. Nitrate of potash, sulphate of potash, stearic
acid, oil of almonds and balsam of Peru, the precipitation of the
mercury from its solution in nitric acid, spermaceti, glycerin, and
oleate of mercury have been more modern aids.
It would be outside the purpose of this sketch to deal with the
questions which the numerous processes suggested have raised.
Apparently it is not completely settled now whether the pill, the
powder, and the ointment depend for their efficiency on any chemical
action such as the oxidation of the metal in the cases of the two
former, or on a solution in the fat in the case of the ointment. These
theories have been held, and do not seem unlikely; but there also seems
good reason to believe that mercury in a state of minute division has
definite physiological effects by itself. At any rate, it is well
established that the more perfectly the quicksilver is “killed” the
more efficient is the resulting compound.