JOHANN KONRAD DIPPEL, 1673–1734

Abstract

DURING the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there flourished a school of medical chemistry known as Iatrochemistry, the main object of which was to search for new medicines rather than to seek to turn base metals into gold.Throughout this period numerous accounts were written about the wonderful curative properties of various chemical substances, usually metals and their derivatives, and gold, mercury, and antimony were each claimed to be the long sought after panacea.At about the end of the Iatrochemical period there appeared a drug having a foetid smell and an unpleasant taste called Dippel's Animal Oil, for which its discoverer, Johann Konrad Dippel, claimed the properties of a universal medicine.This drug was included in the pharmacopoeias right up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the purpose of the present study is to show what manner of man Dippel was, and in what circumstances his assertion was made.Johann Philip Dippel, schoolmaster and pastor at Niederramstadt, was the fourth generation of Lutheran clergy in the Dippel family.About I 670, religious persecution caused him to uproot his home and seek refuge at Frankenstein, and here Johann Konrad was born at the castle on i o August i 673.1 In spite of its romantic name, Frankenstein Castle is an unexciting ruin about one mile south of Darmstadt, overlooking the Odenwald.Pastor Dippel planned that Johann Konrad should become the fifth preacher in the family and to that end he undertook the boy's earlier education himself.Later young Dippel went to Darmstadt Gymnasium (Rector Otto Georg) where his name is first on the roll of distinguished old boys.2There, at the age of nine, he began to express doubts about the Catechism.

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