Given that there was no evidence of the existence of unicorns by the 16th century, what were unicorn horn medicines made of?
The Hunt of the Unicorn, seven stunning tapestries dating to around AD 1500 and probably created by Belgian artisans, now hangs in the Cloisters in New York, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tapestries are spectacular works, woven of wool and silk fibres dyed with extracts of madder root for red, weld for yellow and woad for blue, augmented with threads of pure silver and gold.
Besides being artistic masterpieces, they captivate because of what they depict. In a landscape of flowers and fruit trees, richly dressed hunters pursue a unicorn, portrayed as a white horse with a horn protruding from the middle of its forehead. At the time, the reality of the unicorn was widely accepted, as were the healing powers and antidotal properties of its horn, known as the alicorn.
The first account of the unicorn can be traced to a book written in the fifth century BC by the Greek physician Ctesias, who served in the court of King Artaxerxes II of Persia. In Indica, Ctesias presents a view of India, a place he had never visited. The descriptions of artisans, golden riches, gigantic mountains and elephants were based on stories told by traders who passed through Persia along the Silk Road on their way from China to Europe.
These were true enough, but along with accounts of unicorns, there were tales of a race of one-legged people with a foot so big it could be used as an umbrella, and “manticores” with the head of a human, the body of a lion and the tail of a scorpion. Drinking from goblets made of the horn of the unicorn was said to protect against poisoning.
Belief in the medicinal properties of the unicorn persisted for centuries and included parts of the animal other than the horn. An ointment made from unicorn liver and egg yolk was recommended for treatment of leprosy, and the wearing of a belt made of unicorn skin was said to offer protection against the plague. Apothecaries sold powders supposedly made of unicorn horn to treat all sorts of ailments.
Of course, such claims had to be accepted purely on faith, but when it came to an actual alicorn, the situation was somewhat different. These physically existed, or at least seemed to. In 1540, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I was thrilled to receive a gift of a unicorn horn from the king of Poland, who claimed it was from a unicorn that had been captured in the forests of Poland. The long, straight tusk with spiral indentations was unlike any animal horn known to Europeans.
A challenge to the wondrous properties of unicorn horn, and indeed to the very existence of the unicorn itself, came from Ambroise Paré in his 1582 publication Discourse on the Unicorn. At the time, Paré was physician to King Henry III of France and had already established a reputation as an adept surgeon by demonstrating that treating wounds with a concoction of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine was superior to the usual method of cauterizing with a red-hot iron, which often caused patients to die of shock. In his 1564 book Treatise on Surgery, he illustrated the ligature of arteries to prevent hemorrhaging during amputation and also described phantom pain associated with a limb that was no longer there.
In Discourse on the Unicorn, Paré discussed the acceptance of unicorns by such notables as Aristotle, Pliny and Marco Polo despite the lack of agreement about what the creature actually looked like. “I do not believe in the existence of unicorns and therefore the remedy of the horn of the unicorns cannot be real,” he maintained.
Paré’s comments attracted vitriolic criticism from doctors and apothecaries who treated patients with supposed unicorn horn and were quick to tell Paré to stick to surgery, where his true skills lay. Some claimed he was not equipped to speak authoritatively on such matters as unicorns, and that “the remedy based on the horn of the unicorn had been known for centuries.”
Given that there was no evidence of the existence of unicorns, what were unicorn horn medicines made of? And what was the source of the horn given to Emperor Ferdinand? In the late stages of the 16th century, European explorers reached the Arctic and came across the narwhal, a species of whale that has a long tooth, often referred to as a tusk, that can grow to three metres in length. Like the tusks of elephants and walruses, it is composed of a form of calcium phosphate known as hydroxyapatite and the protein collagen. It has no medicinal value. Unless one thinks it does. Much like many of today’s dietary supplements.
It was Danish physician Ole Worm (there is a memorable name) who in 1636 systematically compared the tusks of narwhals with the “unicorn horns” sold in Europe and demonstrated they were the same. Nevertheless, he wondered whether the therapeutic properties of the tusk were real and experimented with poisoning animals and then giving them ground narwhal horn. Surprisingly, he found that they recovered, but he did not record the method of poisoning, so it is not possible to evaluate the experiment.
In his 1645 book New Observations About the Unicorn, Worm’s nephew, physician Thomas Bartholin, reaffirmed that unicorn horns were actually narwhal tusks, but claimed he had been able to halt a fever epidemic in Copenhagen with a tusk ointment. There is no evidence of this, but the story was enough to sustain Bartholin’s administering of narwhal tusk preparations to his patients at an exorbitant cost.
Today, narwhal tusks have mercifully disappeared from the pharmaceutical armamentarium, although the horn of the rhinoceros still holds the mystique of curative powers in parts of Asia. This unfounded belief has unfortunately led to the poaching of these animals for their horns.
While the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries do not provide any clue as to why the creature was hunted, they do in one scene adhere to the lore of the unicorn purifying water with its horn so that it is safe for all creatures to drink, as well as to the mythology that the unicorn can only be killed after it has been tamed by a virgin maiden. The sixth tapestry shows the hunters carrying away the slain unicorn, but in the final and most famous tapestry, the unicorn is shown alive tethered to a pomegranate tree. This has been interpreted as either depicting the unicorn’s miraculous healing effects, or the allegorical crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
While you will never see a unicorn in a zoo — at least so I think — you can wonder at the talent of the artisans who wove a story into the wonderful tapestries at the Cloisters.