When Medieval & Early Modern Europeans Cleansed with Poison: The Strange History of Antimony Cups and Pills

The his­to­ry of med­i­cine is, for the most part, a his­to­ry of dubi­ous cures. Some were even worse than dubi­ous: for exam­ple, the inges­tion of anti­mo­ny, which we now know to be a high­ly tox­ic met­al. Though it may not occu­py an exalt­ed (or, for stu­dents in chem­istry class, par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable) place on the peri­od­ic table today, anti­mo­ny does have a fair­ly long cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Its first known use took place in ancient Egypt when stib­nite, one of its min­er­al forms, was ground into the strik­ing­ly dark eye­lin­er-like cos­met­ic kohl, which was thought to ward off bad spir­its.

Ancient Greek civ­i­liza­tion rec­og­nized anti­mo­ny less for its effects on the spir­it world than on the human one. The Greeks knew full well that the stuff was tox­ic, but also kept return­ing to it as a poten­tial form of med­i­cine.

Ancient Rome made its own prac­ti­cal use of anti­mo­ny, not least in met­al­lur­gy, but also kept up cer­tain lines of inquiry into its cura­tive prop­er­ties. As a sub­stance, it was well-placed to cap­ture imag­i­na­tions more intense­ly in the medieval age of alche­my. By the late sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, peo­ple were drink­ing wine out of anti­mo­ny cups, as unboxed in the video from the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um above.

“The pur­pose of it is to try and make you vom­it and have diar­rhea and sweat a lot,” says Angus Pat­ter­son, the V&A’s senior cura­tor of met­al­work. In the­o­ry, this would re-bal­ance the “humors” of which medieval med­i­cine con­ceived of the body as being com­posed. Fan­cy cups like the one in the video, which was once owned by a lord, weren’t the only anti­mo­ny objects used for this pur­pose: the met­al was also forged into so-called “per­pet­u­al pills,” meant to be swal­lowed, retrieved from the excre­ment, then swal­lowed again when nec­es­sary — for mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions, in some cas­es, as a kind of fam­i­ly heir­loom. “Not sure I’d fan­cy swal­low­ing a pill that had been through my grand­pa,” Pat­ter­son adds, “but needs must when you have a stom­achache in 1750.”

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hun­dreds of Medieval Med­ical Man­u­scripts with Strange Cures Get Dig­i­tized & Put Online: From Leech­es to Crushed Weasel Tes­ti­cles

Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er that Ancient Egyp­tians Drank Hal­lu­cino­genic Cock­tails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

The Col­or that May Have Killed Napoleon: Scheele’s Green

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Sir Isaac Newton’s Cure for the Plague: Pow­dered Toad Vom­it Lozenges (1669)

The Archive of Heal­ing Is Now Online: UCLA’s Dig­i­tal Data­base Pro­vides Access to Thou­sands of Tra­di­tion­al & Alter­na­tive Heal­ing Meth­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.