Science File -

But hang on a minute: is there another reason, not so obvious, to give gold? It has a very ancient history as a medicine, from the earliest records until today. The Egyptians used it 4,500 years ago in dentistry (it was unromantically used to bind loose teeth), just as today 13 tons of gold are used each year. In the East, elixirs of potable gold were made of finely powdered gold, or gold dust, as it was believed that the untarnishable nature of gold could be transferred as a curative of all known disease, or preservative of eternal youth, to whoever drank them. Alchemy as a discipline didn’t exist until seven hundred years after Christ, but drew on the accumulated experience of generations of magi and other shamans. Dark Age and medieval inheritors of what passed for scientific investigation and experimentation in the ancient world, spent much of their time looking for the Philosopher’s stone – the specific that would transmute base substances into gold (Sol or Rex metallorum). Was the gift of gold also an anticipation of the Messiah's healing and shamanic powers?

 Gold continued to be highly regarded and used medicinally for just about everything, from smallpox to syphilis to epilepsy to “nervous afflictions”; and in the twentieth century, before penicillin, Sanocrysin (aurothioglucose) was a last-ditch attempt at a cure for TB. Weak solutions of gold inhibited the growth of TB bacilli in culture, but the treatment also resulted in stomatitis, glossitis, jaundice, leucopenia, erythema and renal damage. Myocrisin (sodium aurothiomalate, for intramuscular injection) is still used for severe and intractable rheumatoid arthritis.

 “Golden eye ointment”, used for styes, had nothing to do with gold (it contained yellow oxide of mercury), but probably refers to the old folk remedy of rubbing a stye with a gold ring to cure it. Which is at least preferable to Parson Woodforde’s remedy: “ The Stiony [stye] on my right Eye-lid still swelled and inflamed very much. As it is commonly said that the Eye-lid being rubbed by the tail of a black Cat would do it much good if not entirely cure it, and having a black Cat, a little before dinner I found my Eye-lid much abated of the swelling and almost free from Pain. I cannot therefore but conclude it to be of the greatest service to a Stiony of the Eye-lid. Any other Cats Tail may have the above effect in all probability -but I did my Eye-lid with my own black Tom Cat's Tail. (Diary, March 1791)