Thirteenth Lecture

People who make themselves comfortable in life take such things as great; but those who know something also know that such things rise up and sink down again. Around the 1830s, such a soul had found a remedy that had, one might say, made a career for itself: iodine. But the man could not simply say to himself: I'll join in with all the iodine hype — for he was too familiar with the ease with which people usually acquire knowledge out of their own comfort. And so there he stood, in 1821, iodine had made its career, and he wrote in the second edition of a small pamphlet—the second edition appeared in 1832—that the moon consisted of iodine and that therefore one could also heal through the moon.