gems, early lapidaries, early gemology, early mineralogy, medicinal use, Middle Ages, Medieval

The use of stones and minerals in medieval therapeutics has often been overshadowed by a stronger scholarly focus on herbal medicine, partly because medieval manuscripts typically separated treatises on stones—lapidaries—from those on plants, and because the medicinal virtues of stones were frequently obscured by layers of mythological or symbolic lore. Historians may have overlooked these texts due to the difficulty of connecting them to the modern scientific lineage of materia medica. The only known dedicated study of the medical dimension of medieval stone lore is a 1902 doctoral dissertation by Herman Fühner, which, however, was limited by its dependence solely on printed sources. During a 1968 study tour, the author discovered that numerous manuscript lapidaries are housed in major European collections, and these provide compelling evidence that stones were actively used by physicians in therapeutic practices—often even claimed to be more effective than herbs.