Came into fame in Europe in the early years of syphilis. The story told about it (perhaps it was only a clever advertisement, though it is related without any question by Leclerc) was that a certain Spaniard named Gonsalvo Ferrand having taken the disease and finding no cure for it resolved to go into the countries from which the infection had come, confident that he would there find the remedy which the natives themselves employed. He went to St. Domingo, discovered that the wood there called Huaiacon was regarded as a specific, took it himself, and was cured. This was in 1508. Whatever may be the truth of this history it seems that Ferrand was subsequently a seller of guaiacum wood (according to Freind), at seven gold crowns per pound (say 35s.), and accumulated a great fortune. Enormous popularity accrued to guaiacum by the book which Ulrich von Hutten, the German poet and reformer, wrote on the “Morbus Gallicus” in 1519. Therein he narrated his own experience; what he had suffered from this disease; how he had undergone salivation with mercury eleven times to no purpose; and how at last he had been cured completely in thirty days by a course of treatment by guaiacum. This early treatment as it was developed in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries deserves to be recorded. First a decoction was made by boiling 1 lb. of the wood raspings in 8 or 10 pints of water down to 5 or 6 pints. After straining this off another weaker decoction was made from the same wood. The syphilitic patient was prepared for his course of treatment by a few days’ spare diet, and by a few aperient doses. Then he went to bed in a well-warmed room, and early every morning took half a pint of the first decoction warm. He was then covered with blankets and allowed to sweat for two or three hours. After being dried he was given a few biscuits with some almonds and raisins. The process was repeated in the latter part of the day, and so on for fifteen days, only enough food being given to prevent the patient from fainting. In the middle of the month a day or two’s interval was granted, and during that time the bowels were evacuated by an enema. Then the treatment was renewed as before, but a rather more liberal diet was permitted. All the time the second decoction was taken for drink as freely as the patient could be induced to swallow it. Gradually the usual habits of eating and drinking were resumed. It is not surprising to learn that the treatment just described was soon accused of so reducing the strength of many patients that they never recovered from it, and it was being abandoned when Boerhaave revived it for a time as a remedy in syphilitic cases. [Illustration: PREPARATION OF GUAIACUM REMEDIES AND THEIR ADMINISTRATION. (Etching by Stradanus, 1570.) _Reproduced (by permission) from “The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II.” by H. Carrington Bolton, Pharmaceutical Review Publishing Co., Milwaukee, U.S.A._]