Annotation Partner: Hannah Elmer, Sasha Grabovskiy, & Nicole Basile
Annotation Description: To assuage the pain and Cure Gonorrhea; The Work Done in Algiers
For annotation on gonorrhea: In the 16th century, it was synonymous with syphilis. One of the first outbreaks in Europe was in Italy, at the site of the War of Charles VIII, between France and Italy. Already by the 16th century, the two main curatives for syphilis were mercury and guaiacum. In the MS Fr. 640, guaiacum only comes up in a recipe for curing gout (where it calls for the oil) on page 46r, and none of the recipes that call for mercury use it for medicinal purposes.

In recreating these recipes for curing gonorrhea/syphilis, I hope we can reveal more about the viability of these medical practices. Could military physicians produce these mixtures while in camp? How do a wood resin, powdered stone, and urine combine to form a pain reliever? Was this meant to be applied to the patient's pock marks or chancres?

For the historical background, I will consult: Quetel, Claude. History of Syphilis. (1990); de Héry, Thierry. La methode curatoir de la maladie venerienne . (1569);


Recipes: ;
p. 7v:
<head>To relieve the pain of g{onorrhea}</head>

<ab>Take half a pound of finely powdered golden and yellow <m>marcasite</m>, half an ounce of <m>storax</m>, 4 lb. of <m>urine</m>, incorporate well together, little by little, in a <tl>mortar</tl>, then boil all together quite strongly. But the pot needs to be well covered so the smoke does not escape. Then distill the imbibed <m>urine</m>, separated by inclination, in an <tl>alembic</tl>, well luted and covered with a <m>copper</m> head. And soak a cloth with the said <m>water</m> and apply it lukewarm on the pain.</ab>


<id>p052r_1</id>

<head>The Work done in Algiers</head>
<ab>Have a <al>colt</al> of three of four years and feed it on <m>barley</m> and <m>straw</m> cut in the same way as that which they use to feed horses in
<pl>Spain</pl>. Let it drink <m>water</m> from a good fountain or river <sup><m>water</m></sup>. I do not know if it would be good sometimes to let him drink the
<m>water</m> of <m>sulfur</m> springs, and to sometimes give him <m>fenugreek</m> or other hot foods, for the intention of the <pro>worker</pro> is to use the heat
of his <m>manure</m>, and the climate here is cooler than that of Algiers. Keep it in a warm place and use it and make sure it loses none of its <m>manure</m> or
<m>urine</m>, of which you will make a mass or two so that while one cools the other will keep its heat and be suitable to continue. Also have a large flask as thick a
possible, one finger thick if it can be so made, and with a capacity of one pitcher or <m>clay</m> jug, and around the feast of St John place a dozen and a half <m>chicken
eggs</m>, that is to say, the <m>egg</m> without the <m><sup>egg</sup> white</m> and the <m>germ</m>. Others say sixty <m>yolks</m>. And with this dozen and
a half of <m>chicken egg yolks</m> put one half ounce (others say sixty <m>eggs</m> and a half pound) of <m>female silk worm eggs</m>. And after carefully luting
the flask (I do not know if air will be needed for the generation) and bury it in the heat of the <m>manure</m> up to the neck, and leave it there until several
<al>worms</al> are engendered and then remove the flask and do not bury it in the <m>manure</m> anymore. But put it on the hot layer of the <m>manure</m> until all
the <al>worms</al> are eaten and consume one another by shriveling and stirring, and only one remains. Once this has happened, you must lure it at regular intervals, day
and night, with the assistance of two men, who will care for it in shifts, and you will lure it with an <m>egg yolk</m> covered in <m>gold</m> leaf or with a liquid
<m>yolk</m> into which the <m>gold</m> leaf has been incorporated. And be careful that it does not miss such fodder (some say one <m>egg yolk</m> per hour, others
say three, but the thing itself will demonstrate the practice). So nourished in this way it will grow in two month or seven weeks and will become like a <al>serpent</al>,
one span and four fingers long, and one pound in weight, and as the wings will begin to develop, you must kill it, doing so with a <m>charcoal</m> fire in a ring around the
bottle one span away from it, and at that time lute the bottle well so that it does not exhale.</ab>

<id>p052r_1</id>
<ab>or to be safer, go away until the fire is completely blown out and that everything is cold again. Because the exaltation may be dangerous. And for that moment, when
you take[a] it with some tongs, do cover your mouth with some good <m>vinegar</m> and have a protection and cover yourself with it. Once it has died out, put it into a
cloth or a canvas made of <m>silk</m> and fold it and hold it to a board exposed to air and the sun will dry it. Once it is well dry, powder it in a mortar and keep this
powder cautiously Because one ounce of this one thrown on 3 pounds of melted <m>♁</m> transforms it into a finer <m>☉</m> than the other one. But there is not so
much pitch[b]. You also have to choose the oldest <m>♁</m> possible which has often melted before and finely hammered into blades or other works, and at first purify it
by melting and throwing it into some <m>honey</m> and <m>vinegar</m>. The completion time for such work is nine months from Saint John's day until the 25th April.
</ab></div>



Schematic Plan:

Materials needed:
Recipe, “To relieve the pain of gonorrhea”:
Marcasite (or pyrite)
Black Storax
or
Styrax japonica
Urine

Tools needed:

Safety Protocol:
For every step of this reconstruction it is necessarily to use the following: a lab coat, latex gloves, safety glasses, and a dust respirator.

Annotation: "To relieve the pain of g[?]"
On page 7v of Ms. Fr 640, preceding two recipes entitled “Against gonorrhea”, is a recipe that claims “To relieve the pain of g[?].” There has been some discussion as to whether this recipe was for gout or if it could also be for gonorrhea, and thus be grouped with the recipes that follow it. The recipes read as follows:
<head>To relieve the pain of g{out?}</head>
<ab>Take half a pound of finely powdered golden and yellow <m>marcasite</m>, half an ounce of <m>storax</m>, 4 lb. of <m>urine</m>, incorporate well together, little by little, in a <tl>mortar</tl>, then boil all together quite strongly. But the pot needs to be well covered so the smoke does not escape. Then distill the imbibed <m>urine</m>, separated by inclination, in an <tl>alembic</tl>, well luted and covered with a <m>copper</m> head. And soak a cloth with the said <m>water</m> and apply it lukewarm on the pain.</ab>

</div>

<div>

<id>p007v_a4</id> <head>Against gonorrhea</head>

<ab>Cook .i. lb. of <m>old smiths' water</m>, .i. ℥of <m><pl>Armenian</pl> bole</m> reduced in the finest powder, and .iii. ʒof <m>common honey</m>, until the <m>honey</m> stops foaming. Once cooled, strain with great pressure and use the results of filtration by injection.</ab>

<id>p016v_a1</id> <head>Against Gonorrhea</head>

<ab>Soak some <m><pa>quince</pa> seeds</m> in some clear <m>water</m> and inject this viscous <m>water</m></ab>

Historian of medicine, Michael Stolberg posed the possibility of this recipe being for gout, since gonorrhea was a more localized disease, and it did not cause pain throughout the body. However, gonorrhea was not distinguished from other venereal diseases, particularly syphilis (which caused painful pox all over the body), until the nineteenth century by French physician Philippe Ricord (Quetel 111).

In Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, he defines “Gonorrhée” as “The running of the reines”, using the French word, rein, for kidney. Gonorrhea here is either an excretion or wandering of the kidneys. By contrast, syphilis, called “Mal de Naples” by Cotgrave, is defined as “The French Pocks; or, the Neoplitane [sic] disease, first gotten by the French (of the Spaniards) at the siege of Naples, Anno Dom. 1528.” His explanation is historical rather than symptomatic or medical. Here, he gives a version of the common origin story of syphilis, which was believed to have been spread by the Spaniards or Taino captives returning from Hispaniola with Columbus and later infecting Italian and French soldiers alike in the Siege of Naples in 1528 (see Monardes and Oviedo). Overall, neither the definition for gonorrhea nor the one for syphilis mentions bodily pain. By contrast, the entries on gout and its variations do point to a physical discomfort. Under “Goutte: f. The Gowt” Cotgrave distinguishes six different variations of the disease: he includes, “Goute crampe ou, crappe. The Crampe; or, a Convulsion”; “Goutte nouée. The Gowt in any of the joints.”; “Goutte serene. Blindness, or expreame dimness of sight, caused by obturation of the Optick Sinews”; and “Goutte Sciatique. The Sciatica; a pain, ache, or stitch in the hippes.” Furhtermore, he provides a definition for the adjectival form, Gouté(e): “Gowtie, or troubled with the gowt.” Given the classifications of the disease, which highlight the various pains associated with it, and the adjective which describes one “troubled” with gout, it is possible that reducing the pain of the disease would be one of the main concerns for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century physicians treating patients suffering from gout.

The definitions for gonorrhea and gout found in the Dictionnaire de Moyen Français, further support the idea that the former was associated with a type of excretion (that was not necessarily painful) and that the latter caused great pain. Under Gonorrhée, the dictionary reads, “émission involontaire de sperme.” The middle-french definition for goutte reads, “Maladie des petites articulations caractérisée par un gonflement et de vives douleurs et due à la fluxion d’humeurs âcres non évacuées.” While it is defined under the parameters of humoral theory, it is also characterized by the vivid pains (“vives douleurs”) it causes. Based on this it would seem that the author-practitioner intended the recipe, “To relieve the pain of g[?]”, to be for the relief of gout pain.

By reconstructing this recipe, I am not attempting to prove or disprove the efficacy of the remedy. Instead, I hope this reconstruction can tell me more about this medical practice. How accessible would this recipe have been for a physician in Toulouse? Or for an itinerant army physician? The recipe is a distillation that calls for three ingredients: gold and yellow marcasite (powdered), storax, and urine.

The first ingredient—gold and yellow marcasite—is defined by Cotgrave as “fire-stone; a mineral that smells like brimstone; and is of two kinds; the yellow, shining as gold; and the white (the purer, and better of the two) like silver.” He does not define marcasite as a mineral consisting of pyrite, as it is defined today. However, the shining particles—mimicking gold or silver—could be a reference to pyrite. In the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, marcassite is defined as a “Cristal de pyrite de fer sulfuré, bismuth à l’état natif.” Like the Cotgrave, this definition highlights the sulfuric composition of the mineral. Both definitions are inline with the one provided by Biringuccio in his Pirotechnia, where he writes:
This composition called marcasite is found in various kinds and colors. That which is clear and yellow would surely seem to be very fine gold if it were heavier. It is also found, albeit in small quantities, of such a whiteness that it seems to be pieces of well-cupeled and burnished silver. […] Whatever their form may be, they have a strong smell of sulphur when they are handled, and they are not extremely hard. One kind is found that is very easily crumbled (94).
According to the translators of De re metallica, Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, Georgius Agricola uses marcasite as a synonym for pyrite (112). On the Mohs scale of hardness, marcasite comes in at around 6 to 6.5, meaning that is easily scratched. This would meat that, if a physician did not have recourse to powdered marcasite, he would still be able to powder a sample of the mineral himself.

Storax, according to Cotgrave, is a “sweet Gumme”; there is “Storax calamite. The best kind of storax brought from Aleppo, and kept in canes of the leaves of reedes.” And “Storax liquide. Liquid storax; as Myrrhe stacte [sic] (under Myrrhe.)” In a 1555 Spanish translation of Dioscorides’s De materia medica by the physician Andrés de Laguna, Storax is defined as:
“liquor de un arbol que se parece al membrillo; y aquel se tiene por mas excellente, que es roxo, grasso, resinoso, blanquezino en sus granos, qye preservera muy luengo tiempo oloroso y quando se ablanda, da de si un humor semejante al miel” [a tree liquor that is similar to quince; the most excellent one is red, thick, resinous, and whitish grain, it preserves its smell for a long time, and when it softens, it gives off a humor similar to honey] (Lib. I, Cap. LXIIII).
The following image is included in the entry:
[INSERT IMAGE]
The description and image provided in the Dioscorides translation is closest to Styrax japonicus. For the recipe, it does not specify what state the storax should be in. Following Dioscorides’s description, should I use an extract [“liquor de arbol”]? Or is it best to try to acquire a plant and extract the resin? Another option would be to approximate it and purchase Styrax benzoin resin.