Sulfur-Mercury theory

Paracelsus may have heard of the treatment in his travels (Bhava Mista at this same time prescribed mercury for the syphilis brought into India by the Portuguese), or the discovery may have been serendipitous, based on Paracelsus adoption of the extension of the mercury-sulfur theory of the Islamic alchemists to a tria prima consisting of mercury (soul), sulfur (spirit), and salt (body). But while Paracelsus was on this one occasion very successful, there is no record of the number of people he adversely affected while experimenting with potions that were not effective, and it may have been considerable. He did however have a talent for observation for instance he described the relationship between cretinism in children and the existence of goiters in their parents. His greatest contribution to medicine may have been the idea that doctors should act on what they observe rather than blindly following accepted authority. 

In 1661 Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, which demolished what he regarded as either fallacious reasoning or incompetent experiment or both. It was above all an attack on theories of the elements devised by those seduced more by theory than by experimental evidence. We have already encountered the principal element theories that Boyle attacked. Aristotelians had their four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Paracelsians had three, the tria prima of Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt, which were not the same as the common mercury, sulfur, and salt of the laboratory, apothecary s shop, or even (in the case of table salt) the kitchen. Van Helmont had either one or two, depending on how you interpreted him water, or, taking the biblical account literally, water and air,... 

Paracelsus believed that the material world was ultimately composed of the four Aristotelian elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, but that more immediately it was made up of three substances. These were known as mercury, sulfur, and salt, and were sometimes referred to as the triaprima. They were not the actual substances that we know by these names today, but stood for certain principles. Mercury, also known as the spirit, stood for the principles of fusibility and volatility. Sulfur, which represented the soul, stood for inflammability, and salt, the body, stood for incombustibility and nonvolatility. In this theory Paracelsus had revived an old Arabic idea that metals were formed from a combination of sulfur and mercury. He added the third principle of salt, and extended the definition to include all material substances. 

He accepted the Aristotelian theory of the four elements, but he extended the sulfur-mercury theory and applied his theory to all substances, not just metals. He did this by adding a third basic constituent, salt, as Rhazes had done seven hundred years previously. For Paracelsus, salt represented the principle of incombustibility and non-volatility. This theory which became known as tria prima, referred to three basic qualities, not to ordinary mercury, sulfur, and salt ... 

In the alchemical worldview, Mercury refers to the mercurial quality of matter rather than to the element we now call mercury. The alchemists believed that metals differed from one another because they contained greater or lesser amounts of particular qualities. According to Paracelsus theory of tria prima, the three fundamental properties of matter were represented by mercury sulfur, and salt.22 Sulfur was associated with Sol, the sun, and thus with the Masculine Principle, while mercury was closely associated with silver, the Moon, and the Feminine Principle.23 Salt—the fixed, immutable, quality of matter—was associated with body and earth. 

The 1500s had given a purposeful redirection to chemistry (shifting emphasis from gold to medicine), but the basic alchemical theory remained the same. Materials were made of an admixture of some small number of elements the air, earth, water, and fire of Aristotle, though perhaps refined— in the case of earths and metals—to include mercury and sulfur (the Arabic notion) mercury, sulfur, and salt (the Paracelsean notion) or the fusible, the fatty, and the fluid (Becher s notion). 

Traditional accounts of Robert Boyle s matter theory, such as Marie Boas Hall s 1952 Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy, explicitly view Boyle s mechanical philosophy as an importation from physics, which he grafted onto a radically rewritten chemistry. As Boas Hall puts it, Boyle s new chemistry was a chemistry in which was incorporated a physicist s view of matter. The physicist s matter theory refers, of course, to the very corpuscularian philosophy to which Boyle devoted his life s work, the explanation of phenomena in terms of matter and motion at the microlevel. According to Boas Hall, this physicist s theory was radically opposed to the chymical theory that predated Boyle and that he sometimes criticized—particularly the theory of three principles, mercury, sulfur, and salt, invented by Paracelsus in the early sixteenth century. The Paracelsian concept of the tria prima was, to paraphrase Boas Hall, a theory of forms and qualities, an animistic rewriting of Aristotle in the language of alchemy. A brief glance at Steven Shapin s 2996 The Scientific Revolution will show that the approach of Boas Hall is alive and well, hr his treatment of the mechanical philosophy as a whole. 

According to Lasswitz s interpretation, then. Van Helmont s water corpuscles are made up of sub-particles in the form of mercury, sulfur, and salt. Therefore Van Helmont s water particle is a complex corpuscle, which, as Lasswitz states, verges on the molecule theory of modem chemistry. There can be no doubt that Philalethes has borrowed his own terminology of shell and kernel or nucleus from Van Helmont. The Helmontian theory of a complex, ordered corpuscle lies at the heart of Philalethes s Ripley commentary, and recurs both in the Introitus and De metallorum. Yet there is an additional aspect of Van Helmont s theory that Lasswitz was not concerned with. This is the notion of semina, a term that we have already encountered in Philalethes. 

The author traces the positions that writers of histories of chemistry took toward alchemy as a total phenomenon, how they regarded the experimental-practical and philosophicoreligious components of it and what stand-points they adopted relative to such alchemical theories as the doctrine of transmutation and the sulfur-mercury theory... 

Jabir introduced a theory, which was to influence much of later alchemy, that metals were mixtures of sulfur, mercury, and arsenic, except for gold, which was made up of sulfur and mercury alone. The sulfur and mercury of which Jabir spoke were not the substances found in nature. They were purified essences which European alchemists later called philosophical sulfur and philosophical mercury. They were supposed to be quite unlike the common substances. For example, it was said that philosophical sulfur didn t burn. According to Jabir, of all the metals, gold contained the most mercury and the least sulfur. Thus other metals could be transformed into gold if ways were found to increase their mercury content. 

In the twelfth century there appeared in certain Latin works alleged to be translations from the Arabic the theory of the principles of metals namely mercury, which confers metallic properties, and sulfur, which causes the loss of these properties on roasting. Another principle, salt, which imparted refractoriness or fixity in the fire, was added later by the famous popularizer of medical chemistry, Paracelsus (85). 

Create a black-and-white picture that tells a story, then rework the same picture in color. The story should have a chemist theme for example, the story of the alchemists discovery of sulfur, mercury, or antimony Robert Boyle s experiments concerning the properties of gases or John Dalton s development of his atomic theory. 

Medieval alchemists had generally adhered to a dyad theory, in which Sulfur and Mercury were the principles of all metals and change was produced by the interaction of these two principles. Substances rich in Sulfur were more combustible, while those rich in Mercury were less so. Paracelsus took this dyad theory and added a third principle of Salt to it. His three principles—the tria prima, or three first things—were able to explain the alchemical transformations of all bodies. This material trinity matched the Holy Trinity in heaven as well as the three principles of which we are made vital spirit, soul, and body. Important in this scheme are correspondences between the great world, the... 

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