Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [61]
Some method for authenticating substances was sorely needed. Since ancient times, so-called organoleptic methods had prevailed: that is, those employing the senses directly, to judge by criteria of taste, smell, appearance, and bodily effects.46These techniques remained the norm until the nineteenth century, and they were not necessarily useless. A turpentine adulterant would give off telltale fumes, for example, when a sample was set on fire. The most trusted approach was simply to imbibe some of the drug in question. We know from the diaries of Robert Hooke that he would do this routinely, taking a purge or a vomit and judging its virtue from its felt effects. The body of the patient became the instrument for trying substances, and hence the virtue of the apothecaries and physicians involved in providing them. That was why Grew proclaimed on his title page that his salt was "Easily known from all Counterfeits by its Bitter Taste."47 Yet the senses could deceive. And "vile Impostors and covetous Operators" were ready with techniques to help them do so.48 Many alleged bezoar stones were ` forged," for example, by "a cunning cast of suttle and deceiving merchants ... who can so exactly counterfeit them, that themselves cannot know the one from the other, the true from the false."49 If these skills existed, then some more powerful technique was clearly called for to counter them. Could experimental philosophy furnish one?
The first writer in English to propose a more sophisticated approach was none other than Robert Boyle. The topic clearly bothered Boyle: in a general critique of medicine that he wrote but suppressed, he complained that nobody had "chalk'd out the possible & practicable way of discovering genuinenes or adulterations of Drugs & Medicins." His Medicina hydrostatica offered a solution, based on experiments conducted at the Royal Society during the time that Grewwas investigating salts.The book was finally published in 169o, as Grew was setting up his salt works. It proposed using a precision balance to make specific-gravity measurements on drugs and gems to reveal "Whether they be Genuine or Adulterate" (fig. 5.i). Boyle recommended using an oil-based solution for this. Spirit of turpentine was a good option, as it was cheap and therefore "seldom adulterated, as Chymical Oils are too often found to be." Since it was hard for "Counterfeitors" to reproduce a substance's characteristic specific gravity Boyle reasoned, measurements of this kind ought to furnish "a kind of Standard" for judging both the identity of substances and their degrees of purity.50
For the rest of the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, physicians and others continued to express regular disquiet at the state of materia medica. Agrowing literature on "medical anarchy" spread lamentations about adulteration. But Boyle's relatively sophisticated recommendations seem not to have been adopted in practice. Only in the nineteenth century, with the advent of state-sponsored laboratories for standardizing all kinds of values (weights, measures, currencies, etc.), did they find their use. Meanwhile, physicians, apothecaries, and laypeople alike continued to rely on their senses. But they supplemented them with rules of thumb for appraising the plausibility of thepeople responsible for their medicines. Faith in a medicament ought, apparently, to be subject to a face-to-face assessment of its maker. It was not the case that every user in practice tried to meet every