The Medical Relevance of the Liquor Alkahest
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"Summus atque felicissimus salium": The Medical Relevance of the Liquor alkahest Paulo A. Porto Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp. 1-29 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2002.0038 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bhm/summary/v076/76.1porto.html Access Provided by USP-Universidade de Sao Paulo at 08/17/11 9:46PM GMT “Summus atque felicissimus salium”: The Medical Relevance of the Liquor alkahest PAULO A. PORTO summary: This paper analyzes the development of the concept of alkahest from its origins in the Paracelsian corpus to its mature form in the works of Joan Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644) and his successors. Historians of science have usually focused on the chemical aspects of the alkahest, taking into account especially the claims that it was a substance capable of dissolving all kinds of matter. This paper shows the medical implications of the alkahest: it was not only a “solvent,” but an important means of revealing nature’s secrets and of producing medicines. The properties ascribed to the alkahest fit perfectly within Helmontian theories about matter, disease, and cure. keywords: alkahest, J. B. van Helmont, chemical philosophy, iatrochemistry, seventeenth-century chemistry, seventeenth-century medicine, preparation of medicines The liquor alkahest had moments of glory and of decadence. Beginning as an obscure invention of Paracelsus (1493–1541), it was widely praised throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as one of the most important secrets described by the Belgian physician Joan Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644). However, as time went by, it gradually fell into oblivion—and it even became an object of mockery for chemists, being reckoned as one of the fantastic dreams of alchemists. The German I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil) and Prof. Dr. Lawrence M. Principe (Johns Hopkins University) for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this paper, and for their valuable suggestions. Special thanks to Prof. Principe for his help with translations and for sharing useful bibliographical material. This research has been supported, at different times, by grants from the Brazilian agencies Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP, proc. 98/06209-7) and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), which are gratefully acknowledged. 1 Bull. Hist. Med., 2002, 76: 1–29 2 paulo a. porto chymist1 Johann Kunckel (1630–1703), for instance, considered the idea of the alkahest ludicrous, and argued: “If the alkahest dissolves every- thing, it should dissolve the vessel which contains it.”2 In this paper, I aim to discuss not only the important role played by the alkahest in Helmontian theories about matter, but also to focus on a point that has not received much attention from historians of science: the significance of the alkahest in Helmontian medical theory. In the twentieth century, some historians tried to discover if any chemical substance could exhibit at least some of the properties attrib- uted to the legendary alkahest. Ladislao Reti, for example, studied in detail some recipes involving the alkahest, and affirmed that no single chemical substance could dissolve the wide variety of substances listed by van Helmont (charcoal, stones, plants, metals, etc.). After citing the attempts of other scholars to discover the chemical nature of the alkahest, Reti advanced his own theory, by making free correlations between writings by Paracelsus, van Helmont, Robert Boyle, and a fourteenth- century alchemical manuscript about a sal alkali capable of dissolving bodies. Allowing to van Helmont “a margin of poetical or, in this case, chemical license,” Reti concluded that—in spite of some “exaggerated successes” ascribed to the alkahest—some of the recorded operations could have been performed with an alcoholic solution of potassium hydroxide.3 More recently, Bernard Joly wrote an extensive study on the origins and development of ideas about the alkahest in the seventeenth, and 1. Throughout this paper, I use the terms chymistry, chymical, and chymists in the sense suggested by Lawrence Principe and William Newman in their recent paper “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Sci. & Med., 1998, 3: 32–65, on p. 41: “since all the topics we today associate under the two terms ‘alchemy’ and ‘chemistry’ were indiscriminately classed under either term by early modern writers, we advocate the use of the archaically-spelt chymistry to express inclusively the undifferenti- ated domain. This usage will help evade the potential arbitrariness and consequent misun- derstandings evoked when the terms ‘alchemy’ and ‘chemistry’ are used casually in refer- ence to activities between the time of the Reformation and the end of the seventeenth century.” 2. Johann Kunckel, Collegium Physico-Chymicum Experimentale, oder Laboratorium Chymicum (Hamburg, 1716), pp. 506, 527, cited in John R. Partington, A History of Chemistry (London: Macmillan, 1961), 2: 367; Kunckel, Philosophia chemica experimentis confirmata (Amsterdam, 1695), p. 229, cited in Bernard Joly, “L’alkahest, dissolvant universel, ou quand la théorie rend pensable une pratique impossible,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences, 1996, 49: 305–44, see especially p. 309. 3. Ladislao Reti, “Van Helmont, Boyle and the Alkahest,” in Ladislao Reti and William C. Gibson, Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Medicine and Science (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969), pp. 3–19, quotation on p. 9. The Medical Relevance of the Liquor alkahest 3 especially in the middle of the eighteenth, centuries, in which he stated that the survival of these ideas until the middle of the eighteenth century was due to the “persistence of alchemical theories in the work fields of chemistry.”4 According to Joly, the failures to obtain the alkahest in the laboratory were not enough to reject entirely the background of ideas that generated this sort of a concept—even if the properties ascribed to the alkahest seem “absurd” to us—because there was not a new theory capable of replacing the old ones in a satisfactory way. Also recent are the studies of William Newman on the alkahest and other related subjects in van Helmont’s theory of matter.5 Newman aims to show that Helmontian alkahest theory derives from the ideas about mercury in (Pseudo-)Geber’s Summa perfectionis. Moreover, the extreme antiquity of some alchemical ideas related to the theme certainly contrib- uted to the elaboration of the conceptual backgrounds of both authors. When dealing with the work of George Starkey (1628–65), Newman makes a detailed analysis of the laboratory processes described by the “American alchemist,” among whose main concerns was the preparation of the alkahest. Thanks to the relatively clear accounts left by Starkey, Newman was able to explain, in the light of present-day chemistry, what substances were used by Starkey in his efforts to prepare the alkahest. However, we cannot say that Starkey’s alkahest was the same as van Helmont’s. This paper is intended to put the liquor alkahest in its original Helmontian context, clarifying its meaning as an important concept within van Helmont’s medical and chymical theories. I intend to show the origins of the concept and to establish connections with older al- chemical traditions. Moreover, I aim to show that the alkahest was far more than a “solvent” in the modern chemical sense. By analyzing van Helmont’s work, one can see that the alkahest was not a mere chemical used in the manipulation of matter: within the context in which its existence was devised, it was an important means for preparing medi- cines and for unveiling some of the deepest secrets hidden in natural bodies. The operations involving the alkahest were important evidences of the elementary character of water; but even this extraordinary feature is less important than the fact that only through the alkahest would the 4. Joly, “L’alkahest” (n. 2), p. 305. 5. William R. Newman, “The Corpuscular Theory of J. B. van Helmont and Its Medieval Sources,” Vivarium, 1993, 31: 161–91; idem, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 146–51, 175–88 (focusing on van Helmont’s influence on George Starkey). 4 paulo a. porto physician be able to cure hitherto “incurable” diseases, and to prepare a medicine for prolonging human life. Van Helmont’s ideas on the alkahest were taken up by later authors, such as Johann Glauber and Robert Boyle, among many others. By briefly reviewing these authors’ works, I hope to show that the complex- ity of the Helmontian alkahest continued. Although Boyle’s main inter- est in the alkahest seems to be related to his theory of matter, we cannot overlook the fact that medicine was a very important point in his work (as Barbara Kaplan has argued).6 Glauber—whose work was essential to the medical reforms that the Hartlib circle hoped to initiate—also saw the alkahest as the key to wonderful medicines. His personal views about this liquor suggest that van Helmont’s alkahest was not a single substance, as some historians of chemistry assume, but rather a whole class of sub- stances related in some way. Moreover, if we consider the alkahest only as the “universal solvent” (as van Helmont also described it), we run the risk of confusing the idea of the alkahest with the modern idea of a solvent— which would be to lose an important part of the complexity of the Helmontian concept, and of its original medical background. The Historical Background The works of Paracelsus, van Helmont, and their followers were devel- oped in a period of profound queries about medicine in Europe.