Some interesting details as to the use of precious stone remedies for the cure of illness appear in the manuscript notes of lectures given at the Leyden Hospital by the seventeenth century physician, Lucas Schacht, in 1674 and 1675.[243] This shows that these remedial agents were there and at that time only used as a last resort, when the patient’s condition had become desperate, and the physician is usually obliged to record the fact that death ensued shortly afterwards. Thus we are told of the case of a certain Ludovicus Carels who was suffering from difficulty of breathing and purulent expectoration; his body was so distended that he could scarcely move his limbs, and he also had a severe diarrhœa. This was his condition on November 12, 1674, and the symptoms steadily grew worse under a treatment of herb decoctions, until a few days later, on November 21, it is noted that “he only thinks of death.” Still the doctors waited until November 24 before they decided to administer a compound remedy consisting in part of the elixirs of jacinth and pearl; three days later the patient died. In general the chief symptoms which justified the use of such remedies were those of high fever or great weakness. Although by the middle of the eighteenth century the belief in the special curative powers of precious-stone material had almost entirely disappeared, giving place to a more scientific conception of the chemical composition of these bodies, still, we find, even in so capable a writer as the German mineralogist, U. F. B. Brückmann, a lingering trace of the old idea, for while he declares that all intelligent physicians have abandoned their use, he adds, “if, however, any stone of this kind has more effect than an ordinary earthy substance, it is the lapis lazuli, but we have a hundred other remedies equally efficacious and much cheaper.” He also testifies to the fact that very little genuine material was to be had from the apothecaries, he himself having often seen a yellow feldspar offered instead of a jacinth, and poor garnets as substitutes for rubies.[244] Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a famous cordial medicine, called “Gascoign’s Powder,” after the physician who compounded it, had an immense vogue in England. This man is said to have got more than £50,000 ($250,000) from the sale of this single remedy. It is stated to have contained Oriental bezoar (the most important ingredient), white amber, red coral, crab’s eyes, powdered hartshorn, pearl and black crab’s claws; certainly a most incongruous mixture and one well calculated to test the resisting powers of the person to whom it was administered.[245]