As a substance for medicinal use, the Hindus declared the sapphire to be bitter to the taste and lukewarm. It had a remedial action against phlegm, bile and flatulence.[318] A similar action is ascribed to several other precious stones, the medicinal qualities attributed to them being less differentiated among the Hindus than they were with the Greeks and Romans, or in medieval times. To drink of a potion made from the sapphire was said to be helpful for those who had been bitten by a scorpion, and for those suffering from intestinal ulcerations, or from growths in the eye; it also prevented boils and pustules, and healed ruptured membranes.[319] Here we see that the sapphire shared with the emerald the power of strengthening the sight, and one authority asserts that if anyone looked long and intently at a sapphire, his eyes would be protected from all injury, and nothing harmful could befall them.[320] A medieval test of the antitoxin quality of the sapphire was to place a spider in a vessel to whose mouth a sapphire was so suspended that it would swing backwards and forwards just above the spider. The supposedly venomous insect was not long able to resist the power of the stone and fell a victim to its virtues. Wolfgang Gabelchover gravely asserts that this experiment had often been successful.[321] The removal of particles of sand or dust from the eye was said to be successfully accomplished by “warming” a sapphire over the eye, the virtue of the stone thus passing into the eye and giving the organ the strength necessary for the ejection of the troublesome foreign body.[322] This attribution of a chemical action to the sapphire in eye-trouble may be added to the many statements of its general curative powers in eye-diseases. Topaz