Abstract

Alchemists and medical practitioners were drawn to antimony for roughly the same reason—its ability to expel impurities from metals or human bodies. Long before the sixteenth century, when Agricola described the process, metallurgists employed compounds of the brittle, flaky metal to separate silver and impurities from gold. Alchemical allegory depicted antimony as a gray wolf that devoured the king that he might be resurrected, rising—purified—from the flames of the wolf's funeral pyre. This nearly supernatural ability to remove impurities made antimony crucial for alchemists. Medical theorists inferred a similar purifying power from the dramatic physiological effects of antimonial compounds, making antimony a staple in the pharmacopoeia for centuries.No mere emetic—antimony opens the sluices at both ends—antimony seemed to its staunchest supporters a near‐panacea. Sixteenth‐century instructions for brewing an antimonial elixir promised that it “cures the plague, cancers, dullness of wit … breaks the force of every poison; if one drinks it once a week, it cures epilepsy” . By the eighteenth century, R. Ian McCallum finds, “there were more compounds of antimony than any other modern element in the medical chemists' repertoire” . In 1750 the British physician John Huxham praised the flexibility of antimony in wine, claiming that “the dose can be varied so that, in the treatment of pleurisies, you may puke, you may purge, and you may sweat with it” . In the twentieth century antimonials have been employed in experimental HIV/AIDS treatments and continue to be used in tropical medicine, notably in the treatment of leishmaniasis.McCallum has produced a perplexing though interesting little book. Some books are brief because their authors have very little to say, others because they present essays that are simply too long to be mere journal articles but too focused and succinct to fill a full‐length monograph. McCallum's slim volume—at under 90 pages of text—is neither. He has plenty to say: the book is brimming with erudition, jammed with information about what has been written about medicinal antimony since the early modern period. Some will no doubt welcome the table and appendix in the back of the book listing known antimony preparations and the various antimony‐bearing ores around the world.On the other hand, the book has no clear organizing principle, no central thesis. Late in the book, McCallum wonders at the “semi‐religious obsession” physicians have demonstrated regarding antimony and judges this obsession worthy of “further enquiry” . Indeed, this would have been a good starting point from which to build a very valuable book. Instead, McCallum leads his readers on what is essentially a guided tour of the interesting facts and citations he has collected. This style is most notable in his chapter on antimony cups, which at points reads like an auction catalogue. Many passages rise above this sort of historian‐as‐docent narrative, notably his discussion of the seventeenth‐century “antimony war” between conservative Galenists of Paris and their “forward looking” rivals at Montpellier, who advocated better iatrochemistry through antimony . By and large, however, the book provides little in the way of historical context or analysis.Although McCallum discusses antimony from antiquity to the present, he devotes little attention to the fate of antimony in the “therapeutic revolutions” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when medicine's “semi‐religious obsession” with depletives of all sorts was thrown into high relief. It is also regrettable that McCallum, who has had a long career as a specialist in occupational medicine, gives so little attention to the occupational hazards of work with antimony. These, of course, are complaints about what is missing from the book. What is there makes for a very readable introduction to an important subject