t--dominated medical treatment, or at
least the department of pharmaceutics, down almost to our own day, and
their influence is still felt in drug-giving.

While we do not know the absolute data of either the birth or the death
of Basil Valentine and are not sure of the exact period even in which he
lived and did his work, we are sure that a great original observer about
the time of the invention of printing studied mercury and sulphur and
various salts of the metals, and above all introduced antimony to the
notice of the scientific world, and especially to the favor of
practitioners of medicine. His book, "The Triumphal Chariot of
Antimony," is full of conclusions not quite justified by his premises
nor by his observations. There is no doubt, however, that the
observational method which he employed furnished an immense amount of
knowledge, and formed the basis of the method of investigation by which
the chemical side of medicine was to develop during the next two or
three centuries. Great harm was done by the abuse of antimony, but then
great harm is done by the abuse of anything, no matter how good it may
be. For a time it came to be the most important drug in medicine and was
only replaced by venesection.

The fact of the matter is that doctors were looking for effects from
their drugs, and antimony is, above all things, effective. Patients,
too, wished to see the effect of the medicines they took. They do so
even yet, and when antimony was administered there was no doubt about
its working.

The most interesting of Basil Valentine's books, and the one which has
had the most enduring influence, is undoubtedly "The Triumphal Chariot
of Antimony."[31] It has been translated and has had a wide vogue in
every language of modern Europe. Its recommendation of antimony had such
an effect upon medical practice that it continued to be the most
important drug in the pharmacopoeia down almost to the middle of the
nineteenth century. If any proof were needed that Basil Valentine or
that the author of the books that go under the name was a monk it would
be found in the introduction to this volume, which not only states that
fact very clearly, but also in doing so makes use of language that shows
the writer to have been deeply imbued with the old monastic spirit. I
quote the first paragraph of this introduction because it emphasizes
this. The quotation is taken from the English translation of the work as
published in London in 1