To whom does a man hand a set of instructions when he takes care to note which methods cost nothing? Around 1500 a book was no commodity for everyone. It cost more than a craftsman could set aside in a year. Whoever writes this way nonetheless has a reader in mind whom the learned world did not count.
The surgeon
Hieronymus Brunschwig came from the Strasbourg family Saulern and was born around 1450; it cannot be said more precisely. He studied medicine in Bologna, Padua and Paris, at the very houses where the subject could be examined at the time.
He did not work there afterwards, however, but in Alsace, Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia and the Rhineland, before settling permanently in Strasbourg. He died there in 1512 or 1513; this year too the literature records twice to this day. The reference works call him three things, surgeon, alchemist and botanist.
In his lifetime the firearm was new, and for the wound it tore there was no inherited teaching. No ancient author had known it, no textbook described it.
Brunschwig is considered one of the first to write down a procedure for it, and he went beyond the crude grips of his predecessors. He described where the books were silent. This is the briefest proof that here someone worked with his hands before he reached for the pen.
Pictures instead of Latin
Specialist books were in Latin. Whoever did not master the language stayed outside. In 1497 “Dis ist das Buch der Cirurgia” appeared in Strasbourg, the first printed manual of surgery in the German language. It was printed by Johann Grüninger, whose workshop counted among the finest for woodcuts. The book of distillation, too, bears a Latin title and is written in German.
Grüninger was more than the man at the press. He had already developed the two-column page layout that weaves image and text together for the “Gart der Gesundheit”. In this form the illustrations in Brunschwig accompany the description of the apparatus piece by piece, and one depiction runs across two pages.
A picture achieves something no sentence achieves. It works like a sewing pattern laid on the cloth and traced. Whoever owns one needs no master at his side to guide his hand. A book that only describes says “a helmet with a channel”. A book that shows says how deep the channel runs and where the pipe sits.
Three books in one
In 1500 Brunschwig completed the Little Book of Distillation, the “Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus”, the book of the right art of distilling simple things. He had conceived it as a companion volume to the manual of surgery of 1497, and it was again printed by Grüninger.
The work consists of three books. The first deals with the craft procedures, from shaping the bricks for building the furnaces and setting up the apparatus to the kinds of distillation.
The second is an illustrated herbal. The third was a register of ailments ordered from head to foot, according to the understanding of illness of his time, with the corresponding remedies and the folio numbers for reference.
What was brought to him he collected; he did not test it. This third part is therefore the one that has aged least well. What has endured is the first, the apparatus and the furnaces.
Their names sound strange today, cucurbit for the lower vessel, alembic for the head. How the vapour runs through helmet and channel is set out in the description of the alembic and the water bath.
Brunschwig's share is a different one. He says what the pieces should be made of. Glass from Bohemian or Venetian blowers, because it withstands the heat. Clay from Syburg near Dortmund or from Hagenau in Alsace, because it is dense. Whoever names the origin of a material has held the goods in his hand.
Twelve years later the Great Book of Distillation followed. Little and Great refer to the subject, simple substances as against compound ones, not to the size. The Great one, which deals with compound things, runs to more than six hundred pages.
“On kosten”, without cost
He divides the ways of distillation into two kinds, the one “on kosten”, without cost, the other “mit kosten vnn durch das feür”, with cost and by fire. He gives no number, but writes that the ways are many.
Cost means fire. Wood and charcoal had to be bought, carried and tended, and every learned recipe began with someone having paid for this fire. Whoever takes a warmth that is there in any case works without cost, fermenting horse manure, an anthill, a baker's oven.
The horse manure is no curiosity; it is the better choice. Whoever puts a hand into a compost heap in winter feels warmth, although nobody has heated it. This warmth is mild, it does not leap, and it lasts for days. That is exactly what a distillate needs that must not scorch. The anthill holds the same warmth from the same source.
In the built furnace, too, it is a matter of the measure of heat. It is regulated through the supply of air or by distilling in sand, in ash or in the water bath. For the water bath Brunschwig gives a rule that needs no scale. One should test it from time to time with the hand, and it should become no hotter than “dz du ein finger darin geleiden magst”, that you can bear a finger in it. The finger is the thermometer.
Where his knowledge comes from he says himself. First from his own practice and from what he had seen with his own eyes and heard with his ears, and also from the experience of others, learned and unlearned men and women. Unlike almost all his contemporaries, he measured what a piece of information was worth neither by sex nor by education.
In the same breath he invokes the books. He claims to have read three thousand large and small volumes by good masters, among them Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna. Scholars advise reading this number as a claim rather than as information. From the first the craftsman takes his skill; the second is the suit he puts on for it.
Thirty years
From 1505 to 1537 the work appeared as part of the “Medicinarius”, bound together with further treatises. Separate editions came out in Frankfurt between 1551 and 1565, and revised versions followed until 1610. Each of these printings means that a publisher wagered his money on this book still being needed.
Its influence thus reaches into the seventeenth century, and it founded a genre of its own, the book of distillation.
The first part of the Great Book of Distillation cites Johannes de Rupescissa at least seven times as an authority on the quintessence, and more than a third of its thirty-six chapters deal with it, largely following him. Brunschwig could read him in German translation. What is spoken of there is set out on the page about the ninefold distillation.
When the book of distillation was completed, three years after the first printed manual of surgery in the German language, a child in Central Switzerland was six or seven years old. Twenty-seven years later this man threw into the fire in Basel precisely the books Brunschwig had invoked, Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna, and lectured in German.
Nobody reproached the craftsman for what later cost the scholar his city.