Alchemists have long sought the keys to eternal life:
The concept of chemicals as medication was innovated and introduced by the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus. Before him, healing remedies in the Western world were primarily plant-based, rather than chemically-derived drugs. An impetuous, pudgy warlock with scalpel eyes and a no-bullshit attitude, Paracelsus argued that alchemy’s aim is medicine rather than gold. His treatise on longevity De Vita Longa outlines ways how to live for a thousand years, even forever. …
[D]uring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, every major European town had its own “laborer of the fire” toiling away in a shady apothecary. … Capitalizing on the hope that alchemy could find a way around death, countless swindlers rooked the upper classes with bogus medicaments for eternal life. Scoundrels like Alessandro di Cagliostro or the Count of Saint Germain grew rich selling immortality potions to wealthy patrons. One miracle docteur sold a concoction consisting almost entirely of tap water. Living forever was merely a matter of payment.
These hucksters thrived during times not entirely different from our own. “They were received into the centre of a small, skeptical and libertine world that had, in principle, rid itself of prejudice,” explains the Romanian historian of longevity Lucian Boia. “These people who pretended to believe in nothing at all, except, to some extent, in philosophy and science, were ripe to be caught in any trap that a person of speculative intelligence could set. Because they believed in nothing, they were ready to believe anything.”
(Image via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 