1892. | NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 151 
On motion, the report of the Committee was accepted and ordered 
printed in the Transactions of the Society. 
Wo. T. BELFIELD, FRANK BILLINGS, 
President. Secretary. 
f= Silliman’s American Journal of Science and Arts was published quar- 
terly, on the first of April and July, and the jirst of October and January. 
The April and July numbers were bound as one volume, and the October and 
January numbers as another. OG: 
Historical Notes on the Gold-cure. 
BY H. CARRINGTON BOLTON. 
Avoiding all discussion of the merits or demerits of the so-called 
bichloride of gold cure, now so prominent in the public mind, we 
propose to show that the use of gold as a medicine is not so novel 
as commonly thought; and by extracts from early writers on chem- 
istry and medicine to indicate the opinions held with respect to alleged 
‘tinctures of gold’’ at different periods during several centuries. 
The precious metal has been employed both externally and in- 
ternally, in the metallic state, in solution, and by sympathy, for a 
great variety of the ills that flesh is heir to, for over two thousand 
years. The train of thought which led the ancients to employ this 
highly-prized material can be well told in the quaint language of 
the distinguished Dutch physician and chemist, Herrman Boer- 
haave; writing about 1725, he says: ‘‘ The alchemists will have 
this metal contain I know not what radical balm of life capable 
of restoring health and continuing it to the longest period.”” ‘‘ What 
led the early physicians to imagine suchewonderful virtue in gold 
was that they perceived certain qualities therein which they 
fancied must be conveyed thereby into the body; gold for instance 
is not capable of being destroyed, hence they concluded it must be 
very proper to preserve animal substances and save them from 
putrefaction, which is a method of reasoning very much like that 
of some fanciful physicians who sought for an assuaging remedy in 
the blood of an ass’s ear by reason the ass is a very calm beast.”’ 
(Shaw’s transl. Boerhaave’s Chemistry, London, 1727, p. 71.) 
Something of this sympathetical and mental effect was evidently 
sought to be attained in. the very first instance of the administration 
of gold recorded in history: ‘‘ And Moses took the [golden] calf 
which they had made, and burnt it with fire, and ground it to 
powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of 
Israel drink of it.” (Exodus, xxxii, 20.) 
Pliny in his marvellous compilation ‘‘ Natural History,” written 
about 70 A. D., has a paragraph on the “‘ medicinable virtues of gold,” 
which in ‘divers waies is effectuall in the cure of many diseases. 
For first of all sovereign it is for green wounds, if it be outwardly 
applied.’ Pliny describes a form of liniment of gold ‘ torrefied” 
with salt and schistis which “ healeth the foule tettar that appeareth 
