Centuries-Old Longevity Elixir Reveals Gaps in Modern Medicine

Rifling through an old herbal book, Fabien Schultz, PhD, discovered a handwritten three-page recipe. Schultz, head of ethnopharmacology and zoopharmacognosy at Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany, was intrigued by the opening lines attributing the elixir to Germes, a Swedish doctor who died at age 104 after falling off a horse. As Schultz was researching the document, he found a similar recipe for a traditional remedy called Swedish Bitters. But the second recipe was attributed to a physician named Samst who, coincidentally, died at age 104 — after falling off a horse in the 17th or 18th century.

While their deaths may sound like an early modern fairy tale, both Germes and Samst could have been among the era’s roving physicians toting “secret compositions” from house to house, Schultz said. The slight differences between ingredients, ratios, and backstories likely occurred as the tincture was “further modified and embellished through the retelling in these households.”