# Sal ammoniac

**Sal ammoniacum*; the eagle of the alchemists*

**Known today as.** Ammonium chloride, from volcanic vents and later made from soot and urine.

Kind: Mineral

## What was it used for?

For the eyes and in plasters; its spirit, in smelling salts, to revive the faint.

## What does modern science say?

Still used in cough mixtures, in soldering, and in salty Nordic liquorice.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **ammonium chloride**: 

**Mechanism.** An expectorant that irritates the stomach and reflexly thins bronchial secretion, and a urinary acidifier; the “spirit” of it, ammonia, in smelling salts revives by irritating the nose and triggering a gasp. It was long made from the soot of camel dung at the oracle of Ammon in Libya, which named it.

**Dose.** Safe at the gram doses of cough mixtures; large doses give acidosis.

**Standing.** In the pharmacopoeias as an expectorant and acidifier; a food additive (E510) in Nordic salty liquorice.

## What lore surrounds it?

Its Latin name came, after a confusion, from the “salt of Ammon” said by Pliny to be dug near the temple of Ammon in the Libyan desert. Because it rises in the vessel when heated, the alchemists called it the eagle.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The alchemists.** Prized it as one of the spirits of the art, which carried metals up with it in sublimation. See [Alchemy](https://thethinkingpress.org/inspirations/alchemy).

## Sources

- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History*.
- Pomet, P. (1694). *Histoire générale des drogues* (English, *A Compleat History of Druggs*, 1712).
- Martindale: *The Complete Drug Reference*, 40th ed. (2020), “Ammonium chloride.”

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*Sal ammoniac.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-09-30. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/sal-ammoniac

Historical description, not medical advice.