Aqua ardens

In some of his work, Pliny the Elder (24—79 Ad) wrote of the heating of wine with flames. In the tenth century, the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980—1037 ad) described a distillation stUl. Magister Salemus wrote about "aqua ardens" around 1150 AD. The German alchemist and philosopher, Albertus Magnus (1200—1280 ad), studied wine distillation, made improvements, and wrote a manuscript on the production of aqua ardens. 

Another early description of the distillation of alcohol is among recipes by Magister Salernus (who died soon after 1167, A.D.) contained in a compendium of Salernitan Medicine. The aqua ardens (burning water), is there said to be made after the fashion of rose water as follows ... 

Take black wine thick and old, and in one quart of it mix two scruples of native sulphur very finely powdered, one or two parts of tartar extracted from good white wine and two scruples of coarse common salt, and put the above into a cucurbita well leaded (that is luted), with an alembic superimposed and distil the aqua ardens, which you should keep in a closed glass vessel. 

From about 1250, under the names of aqua ardens, aqua vini, aqua vitae, and in the sixteenth century as alcohol vini or finally simply as alcohol the application of alcohol to medicine and to other arts extended rapidly. 

The Aqua Ardens—which bums like wine spirits. 

ALKO - is Tartar. Theophrastus says that it is the purer substance of a thing separated from the impure. Thus Alcool of Wine is aqua ardens rectified and cleansed, the best and purest, the most subtle and celestial. 

The Ars operativa medica was not, technically, an alchemical treatise, but an example, rather, of the aqua ardens literature. We can see, therefore, that Bistichius combining the techniques of the goldsmith with pharmacology was, conceptually, not far removed from the search for a unique body able to act as an agent of perfection in every kingdom of nature. Indeed, according to another chapter in the Testamentum, the wonderful medicine is... 

Concerning the pharmacological use of the aqua ardens see Palmer (cit. above n. 11) and bibliography cited by him, p. 115 F. Sherwood Taylor, The Idea of the Quintessence in Science, Medicine and History, Charles Singer Presentation Volume, ed. E.A. Underwood (Oxford, 1953), pp. 241-65 R. Halleux, Les ouvrages alchimiques (cit. above n. 5), pp. 246-50 C.A. Wilson, Philosophers, losis and Water of Life , Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Literary and Historical Section), 19 (1984), pp. 86-93. 

A, viii, 67. Cardan, De Subtilitate, 8°, Basel, 1560, 1048, called weaker spirit aqua ardens non absoluta. ... 

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