The Advent Of Iatrochemistry

THE ADVENT OF IATROCHEMISTRY

The importance of the feud between alchemy and iatrochemistry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot be overemphasized. It marked undoubtedly the beginning of a new era for both chemistry and medicine by uniting them together. It was part of the general trend, away from dependence on Aristotle and Galen that was sweeping Western Europe with the advent of the Renaissance. Vesalius was tactfully questioning the authority of Galen in matters of anatomy; Paracelsus was thundering against the whole scholastic tradition in medicine; and even a man of the Church, Copernicus, was demolishing the ancient Ptolemaic beliefs within astronomy. This intellectual revolution
reached its point of no return with Lord Francis Bacon (1561-1626),not to be confused with Roger Bacon, and with the first philosopher of Modern times, Rene Descartes (1596-1650). The real struggle was between two different systems of natural philosophy (the old term), with the newer school of thought stressing observation and experimentation as essential to discover reality in the natural sciences (the new term).

In the case of chemistry, in particular, emphasis was directed toward its possible application to medicine and pharmacy, hence the name “Iatrochemistry.” Pharmaceutical and medical chemistry have had a more controversial evolution than their sister sciences.
The great plagues of the Middle Ages had shown the Europeans the pressing need for new findings in the field of applied medicine; and the advent of the commercial revolution, which began with the transoceanic travels in search of spices and pharmaceutical plants, provided the golden opportunity in that age of adventure. With intellectual changes going all around, there had to take place a change in applied chemistry as well. Drugs and their components had for a long time been associated with medicine and chemistry; so it is no wander that the new revolution in the healing arts had to take place in the combined field of medical chemistry.15 The Iatrochemists of the Renaissance provided the starting point of this new evolution of thoughts about
medicine.

Chemistry strove to free itself from the yoke of the alchemist, who had nurtured it up to that point and actually brought it to the stage where further development had to occur beyond the capabilities of alchemy.
Since the chemical and medical knowledge at that time was far from being self-sustaining, there arose a mutual need for both medicine and chemistry to strive for newer solutions conjointly. The chemist was to discover the medicines, prepare them after investigating them chemically, and guarantee their purity (the beginning of the manufacturing organic chemist); while the physician was to examine their efficacy by using them therapeutically on patients, or on experimental animals (the beginning of pharmacology) or better yet both roles were to be eventually united in the person of the medical chemist (the early beginnings of the concept of companies like Celgene, Gilead, Alcon, Merck…) That was what happened after centuries of progress along those lines. No one at that time could have possibly foreseen that this collaboration between medicine, pharmacy and chemistry would eventually result in the wonder
drugs.

The realization that disease was brought about by a disturbance in the body chemistry was a theory that grew slowly; hence the possibility of reestablishing the equilibrium by the use of chemical remedies. It came about that the mutual interaction of chemistry and medicine was the main idea which ran through the mind of the various “Iatrochemists”, or “medico-chemists.” And that was the particular stamp of the Iatrochemical revolution. 11 & 16 As could have been predicted this revolutionary teaching split the medical faculties of all the universities (Oxford, Paris, Salamanca, Salerno, Bologna, Cologne, all founded by the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) into two camps: The traditional followers of Galen and the newer Iatrochemists. It was at that time that the pharmaceutical druggist in Great Britain assumed the title of “chemist.” 14

What benefits came to both medicine and chemistry from this mutual cooperation? Von Meyer 16 is of the opinion that chemistry profited the most at first because its study by physicians who had had a sound and long education lifted chemistry into a respectable trade, far above the “gloomy, dimly lighted place, with the floor littered with stone bottles and old parchment books,” 21 as described by Paracelsus himself earlier in this essay. Von Meyer states further that chemistry’s early association with medicine shaped its course along more scientific lines, because the physicians’ patient turned out to be the experimental animal, the guinea pig! 16 However, had von Meyer (who wrote in 1906) lived a mere fifty or sixty years later, he would have witnessed the Iatrochemists’ prophetic dreams come true in the accomplishments of the new therapeutic chemistry’s trail of “wonder drugs,” used daily in medical practice.