Johann Heinrich Cohausen (1665–1750), Salt Iatrochemistry, and Theories of Longevity in his Satire, Hermippus Redivivus (1742)

Johann Heinrich Cohausen (1665–1750) was a physician and well-known author in the Germanies, France, and England (Figure 1). He was best known for medical satire such as the Pica Nasi, a Latin parody on snuff in which Apollo ordered Mercury to confiscate the noses of snuff-takers. When the satyrs returned them, the desperate victims grabbed the wrong noses and were unrecognizable (Figure 2). The subject of this article however is Cohausen’s last and most famous medical satire, hisHermippus redivivus (1742), a treatise on the prolongation of life. Studies of Cohausen and the Hermippus have been largely antiquarian; the only scholarly works are a French dissertation concerning his medical biography done in 1900 and a short German bibliographic study. Because Cohausen has been primarily known for medical satire, his large number of serious treatises on iatrochemistry and medicine, which served as the basis for his more humorous works, have been largely unexamined. This paper will thus demonstrate that Cohausen’s Hermippus and its comedic presentation of longevity had a profound reliance on earlier scholarly works of his that analysed the theories of the seventeenth-century chymist and physician Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1577–1634). In particular, Cohausen utilized van Helmont’s belief that volatile salts (salts that had an odour or that decomposed readily on heating)