Home › The Therapeutic Use of Precious Stones › The Therapeutic Use of Precious Stones: Voiture

The Therapeutic Use of Precious Stones: Voiture

By the middle of the seventeenth century the curative powers of jade for the various forms of calculi was very generally admitted. A singular instance is offered us in one of Voiture's letters. He was a great sufferer from "the stone" and he had received, from a Mademoiselle Paulet, a beautiful jade bracelet. Gratefully acknowledging the receipt of this peculiar gift, he expresses himself in the following frank way, a mixture of indelicacy and gallantry that seems strange to us: "If the stones you have given me do not break mine, they will at least make me bear my sufferings patiently; and it seems to me that I ought not to complain of my colic, since it has procured me this happiness." The name used for jade by Voiture, "l'ejade," supplied a missing link in the derivation of our name jade from the Spanish hijada. When the lady's gift was received by Voiture, some friends chanced to be present, and they were disposed to regard it as a token of love until he assured them that it was only a remedy. It appears that Mlle. Paulet was a fellow sufferer, and, alluding to this, Voiture writes: "On this occasion the jade had for you an effect you did not expect from it, and its virtue defended your own." (Lettres de Voiture, ed. by Octave Uzanne Paris, 1880, vol. i, p. 66, Letter XXIII.) Renal calculi and poetry do not seem to have much in common, but the following lines freely rendered from an old Italian poem on the subject by Ciri de Pers show that even this unpromising theme is susceptible of poetic treatment: (Josephi Gonnelli, Thesaurus philosophicus, seu de gemmis," Neapoli, 1702, pp. 157, 158.) "Other white stones serve to mark happy days, But mine do mark days full of pain and gloom. To build a palace, or a temple fair, Stones should be used; but mine do serve To wreck the fleshly temple of my soul. Well do I know that Death doth whet his glaive Upon these stones, and that the marble white That grows in me is there to form my tomb." As jade was and still is the most favored stone in China, although never found within the boundaries of China proper, it was very naturally accorded wonderful medical virtues. An old Chinese encyclopedia, the work of Li She Chan, and presented by him to the emperor Wan Lih of the Ming dynasty, in 1596, contains many interesting notices of jade. When reduced to a powder of the size of rice grains it strengthened the lungs, the heart, and the vocal organs, and prolonged life, more especially if gold and silver were added to the jade powder. Another, and certainly a pleasanter way of absorbing this precious mineral, was to drink what was enthusiastically called the "divine liquor of jade." To concoct this elixir equal parts of jade, rice, and dew-water were put into a copper pot and boiled, the result-ant liquid being carefully filtered. This mixture was said to strengthen the muscles and make them supple, to harden the bones, to calm the mind, to enrich the flesh, and to purify the blood. Whoever took it for a long space of time ceased to suffer from either heat or cold and no longer felt either hunger or thirst. Galen (b. ca. 130 A.D.) wrote thus of the green jasper: (Claudii Galeni, "De simplie. medicament., etc.," lib. ix, cap. 19. "Opera Omnia," ed. C. G. Kuhn, Lipsiae, 1826, vol. xii, p. 207. See also Duffield Osborne, "Engraved Gems," New York, 1912, pp. 138, 139.) Some have testified to a virtue in certain stones, and this is true of the green jasper, that is to say, this stone aids the stomach and navel by contact. And some, therefore, set the stone in rings and engrave on it a dragon surrounded by rays, according to what King Nechepsos has transmitted to posterity in the fourteenth book (of his works). Indeed, I myself have thoroughly tested this stone, for I hung a necklace composed of them about my neck so that they touched the navel, and I received not less benefit from them than I would had they borne the engraving of which Nechepsos wrote. Ruby Sanskrit medical literature as represented by Naharari, a physician of Cashmere, who wrote in the thirteenth century, finds in the ruby a valuable remedy for flatulency and biliousness. Moreover, aside from these special uses, an elixir of great potency could be made from rubies by those who properly understood the employment of precious stones in the compounding of medicines. (Garbe, "Die indische Mineralien"; Naharari's "Rajanighantu," Varga XIII, Leipzig, 1882, p. 70.) This famous "ruby elixir" may have had little in common with the stone except its color, as such remedies were generally said to have been made by some secret and mysterious process, in the course of which all material evidence of the presence of any precious stone or stones completely disappeared.