Pompholyx, chalybs and cancer in early modern Italy (HSC collection 01)

In the first centuries AD, Dioscorides and Galen imposed the idea that pompholyx or cadmia, which comes from brass made red-hot in furnaces, were appropriate for curing diseases of the eye. At the Renaissance, another metallic product, chalybs “steel”, started to compete with the traditional drugs prescribed for ocular disorders, and its therapeutic virtues extended to other diseases, notably to one of the most dreaded of all: carcinoma or cancer. This article tries to retrace how, in Italy, during the sixteenth century, a change occurred which led from the ancient use of metallic medications to a completely different one by a series of gradual transformations. This change reflects the competition which opposes the flowering of the sciences in the most brilliant universities of Italy and a revolution in the general paradigm of European medicine