ABSTRACT

One could with near certainty predict the presence of a few highly prized and profoundly potent objects in just about every seventeenth-century museum. One was the unicom’s hom. It was listed as item 239 in Thomas Heame’s catalogue of the museum at the Oxford University Anatomy School. Up in Yorkshire, Ralph Thoresby’s cabinet contained a thin slice of a sea-unicom’s hom - the gift of a Mrs. Dorcas Dyneley. In rather loftier circumstances a specimen valued at £600 was kept in the Tower of London’s collection. The high prices that collectors paid for such rare treasures were not, however, merely an index of curiosity and rarity: they also reflected a medical value. Jean de Renou succinctly described the prescriptive use of such homs in his 1657 A Medical Dispensatory: ‘The Monoceroes his hom doth admirably defend the heart from poysons.” Until 1741 in fact, registered pharmacists were more or less required to carry them. According to the medical authority, de Rochefort, “all the properties commonly attributed to the Land-Unicoms’ Hom” were also to be found in that of the sea unicorn. Renou argued that the same effects could be expected of “Harts hom and Rhinoceroes his hom”.2