R Ian McCallum
Pentland Press, £15, pp 125 
ISBN 1 85821 642 7
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Rating: ★★★
Antimony for medical use has a history stretching back to ancient times. But the use of such a potentially toxic purgative has provoked bitter disagreement among practitioners, inspired vitriolic satire, and despatched countless men and women to an early grave. Recently, the presumed connection between antimony and cot deaths has added yet another chapter to the saga. Advanced by some early modern healers as a near miraculous panacea, it was also revered by alchemists because of its uncanny power to purify gold. By 1678, over 106 standard remedies contained antimonials of various sorts; even more could be found in any 19th century medicine chest.
The history of antimony is important not only in its own right but also for the insight it offers into the changing intellectual milieu of medicine and pharmacy. Like theriac, the sovereign remedy with which it might profitably have been compared, antimony exercised a fascination well beyond the pages of the Materia Medica. Professor McCallum has mined a rich seam of evidence from Scotland, the United States, and France, as well as England, and illuminates his text with an apt choice of quotations.
He is generous with hard facts but less forthcoming in the matter of context or explanation. Readers unfamiliar with the tenets of Galenic and Paracelsian medicine, or with the close relation between physic, astrology, alchemy, and religion, may find some passages difficult to understand.
Since the use of antimony became a battlefield over which members of the English medical profession campaigned against empirics and apothecaries, it would have been useful to explore the wider social and economic issues at stake. One of the most interesting of the many excellent illustrations reproduced here depicts a 17th century healer offering an antimony cup containing tartar emetic to her patient. She is repulsed by his guardian angel, who favours a learned physician skilled in the art of medicine.
The use of such overt propaganda against meddlesome women merits further comment, especially as “irregulars” such as Grace, Lady Mildmay, were at this time practising a promiscuous mix of Galenic and Paracelsian medicine heavily reliant on mineral substances. Any preparation that gave credence to the unlettered or unlicensed posed a serious threat to the status quo.
McCallum rightly emphasises the problems facing men and women who had to deal with human suffering in an age before the clinical advances that we now take for granted. If the cure was infinitely worse than the disease, the prospect of a treatment capable of eliminating all corruption from the body was surely irresistible. In the last resort, the triumph of hope over experience may explain why antimony enjoyed such enduring popularity.