dition
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 diarrhoea* 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
November 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. Brückmann, 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.21
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a famous cordial medicine, called "Gascoign's Powder," after the
"U. F. B. Brückmann, "Abhandlung von Edelsteinen," Braunschweig, 1767, pp. 4, 5 of preface.
