# Armenian stone, pills of

**Pillole di lapide armeno**

**Known today as.** Lapis armenus, azurite, a blue copper carbonate.

Kind: Compound  
Poisoning: Mercury, arsenic, lead, and antimony (https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/poisons/heavy-metal)  
Toxic: yes

> **Caution.** 

## What did Canale use it for?

Among the pills commended for melancholy (ch. 4).

## What does modern science say?

Formerly given as an aperient and for epilepsy, and held to purge melancholy and to provoke vomiting.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **azurite**: basic copper carbonate, the Armenian stone
- **aloes**: 
- **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.

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

**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.

## What lore surrounds it?

Malachite, the green copper ore found with azurite, was ground to paint round the eyes in Predynastic Egypt; azurite itself, a basic carbonate of copper found native in the eastern desert and in Sinai, is the earliest Egyptian blue pigment of which analyses are recorded, used in the Fourth Dynasty.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** Knows armenium as a pigment, one of the “florid colours” the employer supplies to the painter at his own cost, resembling chrysocolla and the colour of caeruleum; once thirty sesterces a pound, it fell to six denarii when a Spanish sand was found that would take the same preparation; and “the only use made of it in medicine is for the purpose of giving nourishment to the hair, that of the eyelids in particular.”

## Sources

- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 35.12, 35.28, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library.
- Lucas, A. (1926). *Ancient Egyptian Materials*. London: Edward Arnold.
- Zhao, Y., et al. (2026). Successful treatment of acute oral copper sulfate poisoning: a case report. *Frontiers in Pharmacology* 17: 1879318.
- Mesue (1589). *I libri di Gio. Mesue de i semplici purgativi, et delle medicine composte*, ed. G. Rossetto. Venice.

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*Armenian stone, pills of.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/armenian-stone-pills-of

Historical description, not medical advice.