Armenian stone, pills of

Pharmacognosy & Toxicology

Constituents

• azuritebasic copper carbonate, the Armenian stone
• aloes ChEMBL
• epithyme and polypody
• scammony

Mechanism

The blue stone is a copper carbonate; copper salts such as the sulphate are emetic and corrode the gut, and absorbed copper breaks down the red cells and can bring on acute liver failure. Mesue read the stone as a purge of black bile, and warned that unwashed it purged by vomiting as well as downward, troubling the stomach; the hiera picra (aloes) and scammony in his pill purged on their own account.

Toxic dose

Mesue gave the washed stone at one to two drams, the unwashed at half a dram to a dram and a half.

Syndrome

Mercury, arsenic, lead, and antimony

Standing

Doubted in its own time: Mesue’s editor noted that some held the lapis Armenus on sale not to be the true stone, and Culpeper in 1653, granting that it purged melancholy and caused vomiting, would say no more of it.

Constituent names open the compound’s record at PubChem, and “ChEMBL” beside a name opens its record at ChEMBL, the European Bioinformatics Institute’s database of bioactive molecules. Where a mechanism line was checked against ChEMBL (ChEMBL 37, read 1 October 2026), the check is shown with the measured value and its source paper, or says plainly that nothing has been measured. Doses are as the references give them, for description only; this is not medical advice. Each source carries the result of its check against Crossref, PubMed, or the authority’s page: see Verification.