Lapidary medicine

Lapidary medicine is a pseudoscientific concept based on the belief that gemstones have healing properties. The source of the idea of lapidary medicine stems from information found in lapidaries, books giving "information about the properties and virtues of precious and semi-precious stones."[1] These lapidaries not only provide understanding of the sale and production of items of lapidary medicine, but also provide information about common cultural practices and beliefs about gemstones.

The most common application of the concept was to embed precious stones within open-backed jewelry. In his book The boke of secretes of Albertus Magnus of the vertues of herbes, stones, and certayne beasts, bishop Albertus Magnus also suggests the stone be held directly to the skin, or more specifically "be wrapped in a lynnen cloth, or in a calues skyn, and borne vnder ye left arme hole[...]"[2]

While widespread belief in lapidary theory has all but disappeared by the twenty-first century, remnants of the idea can be found in the pseudoscientific concept of crystal healing.

References
  1. Glick, Thomas F.; Livesey, Steven; Wallis, Faith (2014). Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia. The Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages. Vol. 11. Routledge. p. 306. ISBN 978-1-135-45932-1.
  2. Albertus Magnus, The boke of secretes of Albertus Magnus of the vertues of herbes, stones, and certayne beasts : also, a boke of the same author, of the maruaylous thinges of the world, and of certaine effectes caused of certaine beastes, 1560.

Further reading
  • Harris, Nichola Erin, 'The Idea of Lapidary Medicine: Its Circulation and Practical Applications in Medieval and Early Modern England, 1000-1750' (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2009)
  • Harris, Nichola E., 'Loadstones are a Girl's Best Friend: Lapidary Cures, Midwives, and Manuals of Popular Healing in Medieval and Early Modern England', in The Sacred and the Secular in Medieval Healing: Sites, Objects, and Texts, ed. by Barbara S. Bowers and Linda Migl Keyser (2017).
  • Marieke Hendriksen, 'The Repudiation and Persistence of Lapidary Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Dutch Medicine and Pharmacy', in Gems in the Early Modern World: Materials, Knowledge and Global Trade, 1450–1800, ed. by Michael Bycroft and Sven Dupré (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 197–220, ISBN 978-3-319-96378-5, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96379-2_8.
  • Loomis, C. Grant, 'Lapidary Medicine', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 16 (1944), 319–25.


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