Chapter XIV: Introduction (12)

"And whensoever I shall have occasion to contend in the School
with such a Doctor, who knows not how himself to prepare his
own medicines, but commits that business to another, I am sure
I shall obtain the Palm from him; For indeed that good man
knows not what medicines he prescribes to the sick; whether
the color of them be white, black, gray, or blew (_sic_), he
cannot tell; nor doth this wretched man know whether the
medicine he gives be dry or hot, cold or humid; but he only
knows that he found it so written in his books, and then
pretends to knowledge or as it were Possession by Prescription
of a very long time; yet he desires to further information.
Here again let it be lawful to exclaim, Good God, to what a
state is the matter brought! what Goodness of Minde is in
these men! what care do they take of the sick! Wo, wo to them!
in the day of Judgement they will find the fruit of their
Ignorance and Rashness, then they will see him whom they
pierced, when they neglected their Neighbor, sought after
money and nothing else; whereas were they cordial in their
profession, they would spend Nights and Days in Labour that
they might become more learned in their Art, whence more
certain health would accrew to the sick with their estimation
and greater glory to themselves. But since Labour is tedious
to them they commit the matter to chance, and being secure of
their Honour, and content with their Fame, they (like
Brawlers) defend themselves with a certain garrulity, without
any respect had to Confidence or Truth."

Perhaps one of the reasons why Valentine's book has been of such enduring interest is that it is written in an eminently human vein and out of a lively imagination. It is full of figures relating to many other things besides chemistry, which serve to show how deeply this investigating observer was attentive to all the problems of life around him. For instance, when he wants to describe the affinity that exists between many substances in chemistry, and which makes it impossible for them not to be attracted to one another, he takes a figure from the attractions that he sees exist among men and women. It is curious to find affinities discussed in our modern sense so long ago. There are some paragraphs with regard to the influence of the passion of love that one might think rather a quotation from an old-time sermon than from a great ground-breaking book in the science of chemistry.

"Love leaves nothing entire or sound in man; it impedes his
sleep, he cannot rest either day or night; it takes off his
appetite that he hath no disposition either to meat or drink
by reason of the continual torments of his heart and mind. It
deprives him of all Providence, hence he neglects his affairs,
vocation, and business. He minds neither study, labor, nor
prayer; casts away all thoughts of anything but the body
beloved; this is his study, this his most vain occupation. If
to lovers the success be not answerable to their wish, or so
soon and prosperously as they desire, how many melancholies
henceforth arise, with griefs and sadness, with which they
pine away and wax so lean as they have scarcely any flesh
cleaving to the bones. Yea, at last they lose the life itself,
as may be proved by many examples! for such men (which is an
horrible thing to think of) slight and neglect all perils and
detriments, both of the body and life, and of the soul and
eternal salvation."

It is evident that human nature is not different in our sophisticated twentieth century from that which this observant old monk saw around him in the fifteenth. He continues:

"How many testimonies of this violence which is in love, are
daily found? for it not only inflames the younger sort, but it
so far exaggerates some persons far gone in years as through
the burning heat thereof, they are almost mad. Natural
diseases are for the most part governed by the complexion of
man and therefore invade some more fiercely, others more
gently; but Love, without distinction of poor or rich, young
or old, seizeth all, and having seized so blinds them as
forgetting all rules of reason, they neither see nor hear any
snare."

But then the old monk thinks that he has said enough about this rather foreign subject, and apologizes for his digression in another paragraph that should remove any lingering doubt there might be with regard to the genuineness of his monastic character. At the end of the passage he makes the application in a very few words. The personal element in his confession is so naive and so simply straightforward that instead of seeming to be the result of conceit, which would surely have repelled the reader, it rather attracts and enhances his kindly feeling for its author. The paragraph would remind one in certain ways of that personal element that was to become more popular in literature after Montaigne in the next century made it rather the fashion.

"But of these enough; for it becomes not a religious man to
insist too long upon these cogitations, or to give place to
such a flame in his heart. Hitherto (without boasting I speak
it) I have throughout the whole course of my life kept myself
safe and free from it, and I pray and invoke God to vouchsafe
me his Grace that I may keep holy and inviolate the faith
which I have sworn, and live contented with my spiritual
spouse, the Holy Catholick Church. For no other reason have I
alleged these than that I might express the love with which
all tinctures ought to be moved towards metals, if ever they
be admitted by them into true friendship, and by love, which
permeates the inmost parts, be converted into a better state."

The application of the figure at the end of his long digression is characteristic of the period in which he wrote, as also to a considerable extent of the German literary methods of the time.

In this volume on the use of antimony there are in most of the editions certain biographical notes which have sometimes been accepted as authentic, but oftener rejected. According to these, Basil Valentine was born in a town in Alsace, on the southern bank of the Rhine. As a consequence of this, there are several towns that have laid claim to being his birthplace. M. Jean Reynaud, the distinguished French philosophical writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, once said that Basil Valentine, like Ossian and Homer, had many towns claim him years after his death. He also suggested that, like those old poets, it was possible that the writings sometimes attributed to Basil Valentine were really the work not of one man, but of several individuals. There are, however, many objections to this theory, the most forcible of which is the internal evidence derived from the books themselves showing similarities of style and method of treating subjects too great for us to admit non-identity in the writers. M. Reynaud lived at a time when it was all the fashion to suggest that old works that had come down to us, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even such national epics as the Cid and the Arthur Legends and the Nibelungenlied were to be attributed to several writers rather than to one. We have passed that period of criticism, however, and have reverted to the idea of single authorship for these works, and the same conclusion has been generally come to with regard to the writings attributed to Basil Valentine.

Other biographic details contained in "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony" are undoubtedly more correct. According to them Basil Valentine travelled in England and Holland on missions for his order, and went through France and Spain on a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella.

Besides this work, there is a number of other books of Basil Valentine's, printed during the first half of the sixteenth century, that are well known and copies of which may be found in most of the important libraries. The United States Surgeon General's Library at Washington contains not a few of the works on medical subjects, and the New York Academy of Medicine Library has some valuable editions of certain of his works. Some of his other well-known books, each of which is a good-sized octavo volume, bear the following descriptive titles (I give them in English, though as they are usually found, they are in Latin, sixteenth-century translations of the original German): "The World in Miniature: or, The Mystery of the World and of Human Medical Science," published at Mayburg, 1609; "The Chemical Apocalypse: or, The Manifestation of Artificial Chemical Compounds," published in Erfurt in 1624; "A Chemico-Philosophic Treatise Concerning Things Natural and Preternatural, Especially Relating to the Metals and the Minerals," published at Frankfurt in 1676; "Haliography: or, The Science of Salts: A Treatise on the Preparation, Use, and Chemical Properties of All the Mineral, Animal, and Vegetable Salts," published at Bologna in 1644; "The Twelve Keys of Philosophy," Leipsic, 1630. These are of interest to the chemist and physicist rather than to the physician, and it is as a Maker of Medicine that we are concerned with Valentine here.

The great attention aroused in Basil Valentine's work at the Renaissance period can be best realized from the number of manuscript copies and their wide distribution. His books were not all printed at one place, but, on the contrary, in different portions of Europe. The original edition of "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony" was published in Leipsic in the early part of the sixteenth century. The first editions of the other books, however, appeared at places so distant from Leipsic as Amsterdam and Bologna, while various cities of Germany, as Erfurt and Frankfurt, claim the original editions of still other works. Many of the manuscript copies still exist in various libraries in Europe; and while there is no doubt that some unimportant additions to the supposed works of Basil Valentine have come from the attribution to him of scientific treatises of other German writers, the style and the method of the principal works mentioned is entirely too similar not to have been the fruit of a single mind and that possessed of a distinct investigating genius, setting it far above any of its contemporaries in scientific speculation and observation.

The most interesting feature of all of Basil Valentine's writings that are extant is the distinctive tendency to make his observations of special practical utility. His studies in antimony were made mainly with the idea of showing how that substance might be used in medicine. He did not neglect to point out other possible uses, however, and knew the secret of the employment of antimony in order to give sharpness and definition to the impression produced by metal types. It would seem as though he was the first scientist who discussed this subject, and there is even some question of whether printers and typefounders did not derive their ideas in this matter from our chemist.

Interested though he was in the transmutation of metals, he never failed to try to find and suggest some medicinal use for all of the substances that he investigated. His was no greedy search for gold and no cumulation of investigations with the idea of benefiting only himself. Mankind was always in his mind, and perhaps there is no better demonstration of his fulfilment of the character of the monk than this constant solicitude to benefit others by every bit of investigation that he carried out. For him, with medieval nobleness of spirit, "the first part of every work must be the invocation of God, and the last, though no less important than the first, must be the utility and fruit for mankind that can be derived from it."

The career of the last of the Makers of Medicine in the Middle Ages may be summed up briefly in a few sentences that show how thoroughly this old Benedictine was possessed of the spirit of modern science. He believed in observation as the most important source of medical knowledge. He valued clinical experience far above book information. He insisted on personal acquaintanceship on the part of the physician with the drugs he used, and thought nothing more unworthy of a practitioner of medicine,--indeed he sets it down as almost criminal--than to give remedies of whose composition he was not well aware and whose effect he did not thoroughly understand. He thought that nature was the most important aid to the physician, much more important than drugs, though he was the first to realize the significance of chemical affinities, and he seems to have understood rather well how individual often were the effects obtained from drugs. He was a patient student, a faithful observer, a writer who did not begrudge time and care to the composition of large books on medicine, yet withal he was no dry-as-dust scholar, but eminently human in his sympathies with ailing humanity, and a strenuous upholder of the dignity of the profession to which he belonged. Scarcely more can be said of anyone in the history of medicine, at least so far as good intentions go; though many accomplished more, none deserve more honor than the Thuringian monk whom we know as Basil Valentine.

There are many other of these old-time Makers of Medicine of whom nearly the same thing can be said. Basil Valentine is only one of a number of men who worked faithfully and did much both for medical science and professional life during the thousand years from the fall of Rome to the fall of Constantinople, when, according to what used to be commonly accepted opinion, men were not animated by the spirit of research and of fine incentive to do good to men that we are so likely to think of as belonging exclusively to more modern times. A man whom he greatly influenced, Paracelsus, took up the tradition of scientific investigation where Basil Valentine had left it. His work, though more successfully revolutionary, was not done in such a fine spirit of sympathy with humanity nor with that simplicity of life and purity of intention that characterized the old monk's work. Paracelsus' birth in the year of the discovery of America places him among the makers of the foundations of our modern medicine, and he will be treated of in a volume on "The Forefathers in Medicine."