How long this medicine was used by the mystical chymists cannot be known, since they seldom communicated any of their processes excepting for a valuable consideration, and under the strictest obligation to secresy. But Cristopher Farnner, who was a humble retainer of Glauber’s, on the small stock of chymical knowledge which he had gleaned from him and from a servant whom he seduced to betray his master and discover his secrets, attempted to become his rival, and set the process for making the golden sulphur of antimony to sale, at the price of thirty rixdollars. Glauber, incensed at his treachery, published his own improved method of preparing this medicine, which he calls a Panacea of common antimony, and it has since under different names, and with some variation, been transcribed into most of the chymical books[63]. According to Geoffroy, as well as the earlier chymists, it was esteemed an universal medicine. It sometimes vomits, often purges, and generally operates by sweat and urine; in a word, says this celebrated writer, it promotes the feveral evacutions, according to the different channels by which nature may be disposed to throw of the vitiated humours. It is recommended in the small-pox and measles, in obstinate autumnal intermittents, in spitting of blood, and other pulmonary complaints, in chronic diseases arising from obstructions in the bowels, in dropsies and in the bloody-flux. It is made by boiling antimony repeatedly in water, with a certain proportion of alcaline salt, and owes its virtues to a portion of regulus being rendered soluble in water[64]. But this manner of preparing it is condemned by Hoffman; who affirms, that the reguline or arsenical parts are not sufficiently sheathed by the sulphureous, as appears from many circumstances which he mentions, but especially from its violent emetic quality. He recommends a different process, by which he supposes the sulphur to be so blended with the reguline, or arsenical particles as to render it a mild and effectual diaphoretic. The fate of antimony and its preparations has been as various as the reports concerning their efficacy are contradictory. They have been ranked among the wonders of the world, and their virtues extolled beyond all probability. They have again been proscribed as baneful, and prohibited under the severest penalties. Those who used antimony in Rome were sent to the gallies. It was prohibited in France by an edict of parliament in 1566; and in 1609 a physician was expelled the faculty of Paris for prescribing it. The edict was repealed in 1650, and it was again received into the number of purgatives; but this having been found inconvenient or dangerous, its general use was prohibited by a new edict in 1668, and it was only permitted to be prescribed by Doctors of the faculty.