William Salmon (1644-1713)

Author of several books which display a career of varied interests: a practising physician as his “Family-dictionary” includes medicinal cures as well as culinary recipes, An English painter and author of “Polygraphice” (London, 1672) which gives instruction of the different categories of painting, and as a quack-doctor in a book by Geshwind M. titled “William Salmon, quack-doctor and writer of seventeenth century London.” Author of “Pharmacopoeia Londinensis” (the New London Dispensatory) and “Palladio Londinensis“, an architecture book. In “ Ars chirurgica“,1699 he is described as “William Salmon, after travelling in New England and the West Indies, set up as an irregular outside St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.” He wrote many astrological and semi-popular medical works.” He said in Pharmacopoeia Londinensis. Or, the New London Dispensatory, (1696) , the Lapis Vegetabilis (The Vegetable Stone). “Rx. Take a dry plant, digest it with its own distilled water: draw from it the flegm, spirit, and oil; from the feces extract a salt (by calcination) with the flegm: then draw a tincture from the same kind of herb with the spirit; impregnate the salt with the tincture, and add as much of the oil as the salt so impregnated can swallow up, then coagulate like a stone…. It has all the virtues of the herbs exalted from whence it is extracted.” He also published a series of books, “The London almanack for the year of our Lord 1691 – 1700”.
A biolography of him is at A 17th Century Renaissance Man, Dr William Salmon: Copyright © 2004 Bruce Tober All Rights Reserved.