# Gold leaf

**Foglie d’oro**

**Known today as.** Beaten gold.

Kind: Mineral

## What did Canale use it for?

Seven leaves in the oil for the bewitched; gold is also blessed at Epiphany and ground into the blessed oil of Treatise Two (ch. 9; Treatise Two).

## What does modern science say?

Metallic gold is practically inert in the body; its value here was symbolic, as the Magi’s gift.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **gold**: 
- **auranofin**: the modern gold drug

**Mechanism.** Metallic gold is inert and passes through the body; the gold salts of the twentieth century, sodium aurothiomalate by injection and auranofin by mouth, modify the immune system and were a standard treatment of rheumatoid arthritis from 1929 until the biologics.

**Dose.** The salts injure the kidney and the marrow; gold leaf does nothing.

**Standing.** Auranofin remains licensed and is studied against parasites and cancers.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** Gold is prized, Pliny argues, not for colour or weight but “because gold is the only substance in nature that suffers no loss from the action of fire,” and “the oftener gold is subjected to the action of fire, the more refined in quality it becomes.” Of the leaf itself: “a single ounce of it admits of being beaten out into seven hundred and fifty leaves, or more, four fingers in length by the same in breadth. The thickest kind of gold-leaf is known as ‘leaf of Præneste,’ it still retaining that name from the excellence of the gilding upon the statue of Fortune there. The next in thickness is known as the ‘quæstorian leaf.’” Gold, he adds, “is subject to no rust, no verdigris,” and “admits, too, beyond all other metals, of being spun out and woven like wool.”

## Sources

- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 33.19, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library.
- Forestier, J. (1935). “Rheumatoid arthritis and its treatment by gold salts.” *Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine* 20.
- Kean, W. F., and Kean, I. R. L. (2008). “Clinical pharmacology of gold.” *Inflammopharmacology* 16.

---

*Gold leaf.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/gold-leaf

Historical description, not medical advice.