Historical and biochemical aspects of a seventeenth century gold-based aurum vitae recipe.

The medicinal chemistry and biomedical applications of gold complexes have been intensively studied over the last decades. Some complexes have been used for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, and a considerable number of new metallodrug candidates have been developed as new anticancer drugs and anti-infectives. However, the therapeutic use of gold and its complexes goes back to ancient times and was also of great importance for alchemists until the modern age. In this report, we give an overview of the alchemic medicine between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth century and describe the cytotoxicity and thioredoxin reductase (TrxR) inhibition of a typical "aurum vitae" medicine, which was prepared according to a recipe by Bartholomäus Kretschmar from the seventeenth century. "Aurum vitae" consists of a mixture of gold, mercury and antimony complexes and shows the expected cytotoxic and TrxR inhibitory properties providing some rationale for therapeutic effects of this kind of historical medicinal preparation.

The End of Alchemy? The Repudiation and Persistence of Chrysopoeia at the Académie Royale des Sciences in the Eighteenth Century.

The general abandonment of serious endeavor toward metallic transmutation represents a major development in the history of chemistry, yet its exact causes and timing remain unclear. This essay examines the fate of chrysopoeia at the eighteenth-century Académie Royale des Sciences. It reveals a long-standing tension between Académie chemists, who pursued transmutation, and administrators, who tried to suppress it. This tension provides background for Etienne-François Geoffroy's 1722 paper describing fraudulent practices around transmutation. Although transmutation seems to disappear after Geoffroy's paper, manuscripts reveal that most of the institution's chemists continued to pursue it privately until at least the 1760s, long after widely accepted dates for the "demise of alchemy" in learned circles.

Causes and consequences of a tropical forest gold rush in the Guiana Shield, South America.

Statistical and spatial analyses of both historical time series and remotely sensed data show a link between the spatial distribution and growth of gold production across the Guiana Shield in northeast Amazonia. Results indicate that an exponential rise in production across an expanding area is primarily a delayed response to the 1971-1978 market flotation of international gold prices. The subsequent 10-fold (2-fold) average nominal (real) price increase has provided a compelling economic incentive to mass exploitation of lower-grade gold deposits. The ground-based and remotely sensed distributions of mining activity are strongly attached to these deposits that dominate the region's gold geology. The presence of these gold-bearing formations in conservation and sustainable timber zones has sparked social conflict and environmental degradation across the region. Left unmanaged, more than a quarter-million square-kilometer area of tropical forest zoned for protection and sustainable management could ultimately be compromised by the price-driven boom in gold mining through poorly integrated resource use planning, lack of reclamation effort, and control of illegal operations. Serious public health issues propagated through the unregulated mining environment further erode the financial benefits achieved through gold extraction. This study demonstrates in part how international economic policies successfully stabilizing more conspicuous centers of the global economy can have unintended but profound environmental and social impacts on remote commodity frontiers.

Nazi Dental Gold: from Dead Bodies to Swiss Banks.

On the 23rd of September 1940 SS Reichsfürher Heinrich Himmler, gave the SS doctors orders to collect the gold teeth from the mouths of those killed in death camps. Here we ask: who were the SS dentists who are directly implicated in that collection, what were the figures behind the process and how did the Nazis conduct this retrieval of gold? Here we give the answers for the first time...

The social and political meaning of the silent epidemic of miners' phthisis, Bendigo 1860-1960.

Miners' Phthisis was suffered by goldminers in the Central Victorian city of Bendigo, Australia for 100 years from the 1860s to the 1960s. This paper examines the disease using the framework put forward by Karl Figlio in a study of miners' nystagmus and later adapted by Evan Willis to consider the social processes of Repetition Strain Injury. It demonstrates that a study of industrial disease does not require moral judgements on the disease's biological reality or medical controversy about its treatment in order to fit within such a framework. More, it argues that without an understanding of the social and political meaning of the disease historically and progressively, the biological has itself little meaning.

The dawn of dentistry: dentistry among the Etruscans.

The Etruscans were a group of agricultural people who evolved into an urban population of craftsmen, traders, and navigators who lived in a network of cities and dominated the area of the Mediterranean around Italy in the 8th and 9th centuries BC. What has come to be known, and is of importance in our study of the history of dentistry are a significant number of very interesting works of art which include gold dental prostheses. The Etruscan prostheses are remarkable because they used gold bands which were soldered into rings instead of the gold wires which are seen in other cultures (Egyptians, Phoenicians) of the same time.

Blood as the earliest drug, its substitutes, preparations and latest position.

Blood was soul and Redness its active principle when red substances were rich in soul-content. But soul was a substance whence blood became a drug which donated soul to treat wounds and incurable diseases. Its redness as life-force, but also as substance, could prolong life. A drug made from human blood could treat serious wounds and as a life saving drug was also a drug of fertility. The latest use of blood appears as syrup haemoglobin while the latest use of human blood would be blood transfusion.

[Ernst Hasenclever in Gongo-Soco: English exploitation of the gold mines in the state of Minas Gerais in the nineteenth century]. / Ernst Hasenclever em Gongo-Soco: exploração inglesa nas minas de ouro em Minas Gerais no século XIX.

Based on the report of Ernst Hasenclever on his visit to the Gong-Soco gold mine in 1839, this article seeks to understand the labor and administrative organizational system implemented by the English gold mining companies in Minas Gerais, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century at a time when the slave-based system was in its final stages. Our objective is to show the continuity of the administrative system and the use of slave labor by the English companies from the 1830s until the end of the century, despite the pressure applied by England against the transatlantic slave trade and the prohibition of Her Majesty's subjects to own slaves anywhere in the world.

Gold, credit, and mortality: distinguishing deflationary pressures on the late medieval English economy.

This article uses national and local records of debt and evidence from coins, prices, and wages to discuss the economic effects of the gold coinage that was introduced into England in 1344. It distinguishes between the deflationary effects of gold and those of the falling population on prices and credit, and shows that a coinage dominated by gold reduced the volume of credit and transactions far more than the mortality rate and the total circulation of coin would indicate was likely. It relates these findings to the economic and social changes of the fifteenth century.