RULAND, MARTIN

(b. Lauingen. Germany, 11 November 1569: d. Prague. Bohemia. 3 April 1611)

medicine, iatrochemistry.

Ruland’s father was Martin Ruland the elder (1532–1602). who, in the last years of his life, was physician to Emperor Rudolf II. Ruland received the M.D. from the University of Basel in 1587. His interest in alchemy and iatrochemistry may have developed while he was at Basel or may have been entirely due to the influence of his father, who favored Paracelsian reforms and the use of chemically prepared medicines.

Nothing is known of Ruland again until 1594. when he was a physician at Regenshurg. His alchemical interests first emerged in two works of 1595 and 1597, which argued that the gold tooth reportedly cut by a Silesian boy was genuine and could have been naturally generated, a conclusion of some alchemical significance. In 1600 Ruland published an extensive discussion of the nature, causes, symptoms, and treatment of the morbus hungaricus, which was in all probability typhus. He also proposed a number of remedies, many of which involved chemical preparations.

The major aspects of Ruland’s thought were his alchemical philosophy of nature and his advocacy of chemical medicines. In 1606, while at Regensburg, he was charged with dispensing poisonous medicines. (Even as late as the turn of the seventeenth century. Paracelsian medical reforms and iatrochemical remedies had little official approval in Germany.) Ruland’s attitude was moderate: he did not entirely reject the traditional Galenic position, but his concept of medicine was generally based upon Paracelsian theories. Because nature and man are primarily chemical in composition and function, he believed, the physician should study chemistry in order to understand nature and should use chemicals to aid nature in curing diseases. He therefore concluded that chemically prepared remedies were safe and legitimate. Ruland’s works illustrate the tension between traditional Galenist medical theory and the reformist iatrochemists, as well as between individuals of similar outlook, such as himself and his major opponent. Johann Oberndorfer, thereby indicating the complexity of medical controversies at that time. In 1607 Ruland was appointed physician to Emperor Rudolf II and settled in Prague.

Ruland’s cosmology was derived from Renaissance Neoplatonic Hermeticism, according to which the cosmos is a unity modeled on divine archetypes. All aspects of the universe are interconnected by spiritual forces, and nature is strictly chemical in its operation. Salt, sulfur, and mercury, the three principles of Paracelsus, are the basis of all things: and the principal instrument for the study of nature is fire and the alchemical processes involving it. On the basis of this cosmology, Ruland argued that the transmutation of metals into gold was possible with the aid of the philosophers’ stone, which was also the universal medicine capable of curing all diseases. Lexicon alchemiae, including much Paracelsian terminology, was issued posthumously in 1612.

Ruland’s work is significant as an illustration of the process of the assimilation of Paracelsian reforms in medicine and chemistry, which had an important impact on the development of those fields in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Further, before the establishment of a mechanical and mathematical conception of nature in the seventeenth century, many natural philosophers, like Ruland. found in the Hermetic and alchemical approach to nature a stimulating alternative to traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. There has been some confusion between the works of Ruland and those attributed to his father. The following are undoubtedly by Martin Ruland the younger: Nova et in omeni memoria omnino in audita historia de aureo dente qui nuper in Silesia puero cuidam septennii succrevisse magna omnium admiratione animadversus est et eiusdem de eodem judicium (Frankfurt, 1595): Demtonstratio Judicii de dente aureopueri Silesii adversus responsionem M. Ioh. Ingolstetteri (Frankfurt, 1597); De perniciosae luis ungaricae (Frankfurt, 1600); Progymnsmata alchemiae … (Frankfurt, 1607); Propugnaculum chymiatriae: Das ist, Beantwortung und Beschützung der alchymistischen Artzneyen … (Leipzig, 1608); Alexicacus chymiatricus … (Frankfurt, 1611); and Lexicon alchemine sive dictionarium alchemisticum … (Frankfurt, 1612).

II. Secondary Literature. There has been no serious study of Ruland, and his life will not be covered well until archival material, as well as his works, can be studied in depth. The works below give what information there is and some relevant aspects of the background. For earlier secondary works, consult the bibliography in John Ferguson,Bibliotheca chemica, 2 vols. (London, 1954). II, 304; F. H. Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (Philadelphia, 1929), 243; J.R.Partington, A History of Chemistry, II (London, 1961), 161–162; Wolfgang Schneider, “Die deutschen Pharmakopöen des 16. Jahrhunderts und Paracelsus,” in Pharmazeutische Zeitung, 106 (1961), 1141–1145; and “Der Wandel des Arzneischatzes im 17. Jahrhundert und Paracelsus,” in Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, 45 (1961), 201–215; and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science. 8 vols. (New York, 1922–1948), VII, 159–160, and VIII, 371–372.

N. H. Clulee