A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage Page A

and ferocity. His favorite pastime was plotting against his father-in-law, the king of France. Now, after a night of debauchery, Charles had been struck down by fever and paralysis. His doctors decided to administer a medicine reputed to have miraculous healing powers, and made using an almost magical process: the distillation of wine.
    One of the first Europeans to experiment with this novel process was the twelfth-century Italian alchemist Michael Saler-nus, who learned of it from Arab texts. "A mixture of pure and very strong wine with three parts salt, distilled in the usual vessel, produces a liquid which will flame up when set on fire," he wrote. Evidently, this process was known only to a select few at the time, since Salernus wrote several of the key words of this sentence (including wine and salt) in secret code. Since distilled wine could be set on fire, it was called aqua ardens, which means "burning water."
    Of course, burning also described the unpleasant sensation produced in the throat after swallowing distilled wine. Yet those who tried drinking small quantities of aqua ardens found that this initial discomfort, sometimes disguised using herbs, was far outweighed by the sensation of invigoration and well-being that swiftly followed. Wine was widely used as a medicine, so it seemed only logical that concentrated and purified wine should have even greater healing powers. By the late thirteenth century, as universities and medical schools were flowering throughout Europe, distilled wine was being acclaimed in Latin medical treatises as a miraculous new medicine, aqua vitae, or "water of life."
    One firm believer in the therapeutic power of distilled wine was Arnald of Villanova, a professor at the French medical school of Montpellier, who produced instructions for distilling wine around 1300. "The true water of life will come over in precious drops, which, being rectified by three or four successive distillations, will afford the wonderful quintessence of wine," he wrote. "We call it aqua vitae, and this name is remarkably suitable, since it is really a water of immortality. It prolongs life, clears away ill-humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth."
    Aqua vitae seemed supernatural, and in a sense it was, for distilled wine has a far higher alcohol content than any drink that can be produced by natural fermentation. Even the hardiest yeasts cannot tolerate an alcohol content greater than about 15 percent, which places a natural limit on the strength of fermented alcoholic drinks. Distillation allowed alchemists to circumvent this limit, which had prevailed since the discovery of fermentation thousands of years earlier. Arnald's pupil, Raymond Lully, declared aqua vitae "an element newly revealed to men but hid from antiquity, because the human race was then too young to need this beverage destined to revive the energies of modern decrepitude." Both men lived to be well over seventy, an unusually advanced age for the time, which may have been taken as evidence for aqua vitae's life-prolonging power.
    This wonderful new medicine could either be administered as a drink or applied externally to the affected part of the body. Aqua vitae's proponents believed it could preserve youth; improve memory; treat diseases of the brain, nerves, and joints; revive the heart; calm toothache; cure blindness, speech defects, and paralysis; and even protect against the plague. It was, in short, regarded as a panacea, which was why Charles the Bad's doctors decided to administer it to their patient. Working by candlelight, they enveloped the king in sheets soaked with aqua vitae, hoping that contact with the magical fluid would cure his paralysis. But the treatment went disastrously wrong: The sheets were accidentally ignited by a careless servant's candle, and the king instantly went up in flames. His subjects are said to have regarded his fiery and agonizing death as a divine judgment, for one of the king's final acts had been