was
corrosive sublimate. Probably, conscientious and truly religious as he
was, he was unwilling to take an active part in such an affair. The
king ordered that his discredited bezoar should be cast into the fire
and destroyed. As an illustration of Ambroise Paré's humility and piety
we may cite his remark on the recovery of one of his patients: "I
treated him and God cured him." 9 It was Paré who operated
upon Admiral Coligny after the unsuccessful attempt on the latter's
life made a few days before his assassination on St. Bartholomew's Day,
August 24, 1572, at the outset of the dreadful massacre.
Alluding
to the ill-success attending the experiment performed by Ambroise
Paré, in order to test effectively the supposed virtues of the
substance as an antidote for poisons, Engelbert Kaempfer remarks that
Paré's bezoar may have been of inferior quality, and, moreover, bezoars
could not be successfully used to counteract mineral poisons, but were
only useful when vegetable poisons had been taken. This opinion-was
probably due to the fact that the bezoar itself is largely or in the
main a vegetable substance. That the interior layers of a specimen
should be inferior in quality to the external layers was not for
Kaempfer a proof of its spurious character, but might easily be
accounted for by a change of pasturage in the case of the creature in
whose body the concretion had formed.
This
writer asserts that he considered those bezoars to be genuine which
were of a partly resinous and partly mineral composition, so that when
pulverized they could be dissolved in nitric acid, the solution having
a reddish hue. The Persians not only attributed to bezoars the same
virtues as did the Europeans, but also recommended the administration
of the bezoar elixir to persons in health, that they might avoid
contracting disease and prolong their lives,
· Ambroise Paré, " Œuvres Completes," Paris, 1841, vol. iii, pp. 341, 342.
