For centuries, Europeans’ #1 go-to treatment for the disease Syphilis was an administration of mercury. Physicians managed it via theraputic fumigation, through injections, and as topical creams – often in the form of mercurous chloride, called “sweet mercury” or “calomel”. As the 16th-century poem “Syphilis” notes: “All men concede that mercury’s the best/ Of agents that will cure a tainted breast”. It wasn’t the best cure, of course — it poisoned the already-afflicted instead. But why were so many Europeans convinced otherwise for so long?.
One of the reasons has to do with the legacy of alchemy from Medieval Europe. The element mercury was thought to be transformative in all sorts of ways. Also known as “quicksilver,” it was unique in its midway status between liquid and solid states, and had been used to cultivate other states of change in the nascent discipline of chemistry.
But there was another idea about mercury that kept doctors invested in their wrong assumption that the toxic metal would heal their stricken patients. It was the notion that they could cure people of disease by purging it from their bodies. When given in high enough doses, mercury causes a person to salivate, and it was a potent diuretic. Tragically, the signs that a doctor understood as the mercury “working” for his patients actually meant that the element was poisoning them.
Fascinatingly, even though mercury could only bring harm to those with advanced Syphilis, in its early stages, topical applications might indeed have helped reduce the soft, tumor-like growth of the tissues common amongst the afflicted. But don’t try this one at home . . . .
Source(s): “Two minutes with Venus, two years with Mercury — mercury as an antisyphilitic chemotherapeutic agent,” _Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine_, vol. 83 June 1990, J G O’Shea. @nyamcenterforhistory.org, “Books, Health, and History: The New York Academy of Medicine,” “Syphilis, or the French Disease,” cited by Rebecca Pou. Image wikipedia.
