Materia medica in the seventeenth-century Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo

Abstract

AbstractThe Paper Museum comprisesc.10 000 drawings and prints, most of which are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. When viewed in their seventeenth-century context, 25 of these drawings depict ‘geological’ material that also served as materia medica: earths, calculi, bezoars, toadstones, corals, calcifying alga, fungus stone, lodestone, eagle-stones, Bologna stone, amber, amulets, figured stones and gems. Some of these are listed in the official 1639 pharmacopoeia of Rome. Eleven of these drawings are reproduced here, nine of them for the first time. A single drawing may depict up to 25 specimens, many of which were in the collections of members of the Academy of the Lynxes (Lincei) or collectors known to them. The archives of Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657) confirm the Lincei's interest both in Paracelsian chemistry and in materia medica. Cassiano owned copies of two fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts listing more than 34 minerals with their therapeutic uses. The Lincei also published a sixteenth-century manuscript containing 26 ‘minerals suitable for medical use’:De materia medica Novae Hispaniae, by Francisco Hernández (1651), whose work in materia medica has been lauded as ‘the most original … in the entire Renaissance’.