ABSTRACT
Progressing into the industrial age, the more adventurous scholars attempted to decipher the chemical basis of natural compounds. Synthetic chemistry was in its infancy. But as the basic sciences of chemistry and biology were poorly understood, the biochemical mechanism of how poisons interact with the physiology would be forced to wait several centuries before an explanation would be available. In fact, it was not until the 15th century that the physician Paracelsus, one of the early “fathers of toxicology,” would promote that all matter was composed of three “primary bodies” (sulfur, salt, and mercury) and that “all substances are poisons, there is none which is not a poison . . . the right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy” (Paracelsus, 1493-1541). Yet toxicology as a field of scholarly endeavor would need to be patient until the mid to late 1600s to be conceptually accepted as a discipline.
