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Antimony in Medical History: An Account of the Medical Uses of Antimony and Its Compounds since Early Times to the Present (review)

There is no doubt about the importance of antimony in early modern medicine. Although many chemically prepared medicines were introduced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, antimony and its compounds caused more debate than any of the others. Indeed, the century from ca. 1560 to ca. 1660 has been termed the “Antimony War,” a conflict that witnessed acrid confrontation between Galenists and iatrochemists. Although much has been written on this topic already, Professor McCallum’s book will not be an unwelcome addition to this literature. As emeritus professor of occupational health, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, and former editor of the British Journal of Industrial Medicine, and with a longtime association with the antimony industry of northeast England, he is particularly well suited for this research. Antimony in Medical History is a slim volume of ninety-eight pages (of which nearly twenty are illustrations) plus two tables: the first, of antimony preparations, and the second, a list of antimony ores. The first chapter covers the period from the ancient Near East through the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on the fourteenth-century De consideratione quintae essentiae of John of Rupescissa. Here McCallum relies heavily on Robert P. Multhauf’s fundamental study, “John of Rupescissa and the Origins of Medical Chemistry.”1 The heart of the book, chapters 2–6, deals with the period from Paracelsus through the end of the seventeenth century; the final three chapters proceed to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. However, this book should have been longer. The reader often has the feeling of being presented with little more than a list of authors who have mentioned antimony. Much more could have been said about the complex setting of the period, involving the assimilation of chemically prepared medicines to the traditional materia medica. And although the author has done an excellent job