Sylvius, Franciscus (known as Dr. Sylvius) , is cited so often and so widely as the inventor of gin that drinks historians have come to despair of ever stripping him of that title, one to which he has no claim. The attribution was injected into the mainstream of drink history by Samuel Morewood, the founder of the field, in his pioneering 1824 Essay on the Inventions and Customs of Both Ancients and Moderns in the Use of Inebriating Liquors. See mixography. In writing about gin, he notes that “Kaempfer attributes the discovery of this spirit to Professor Sylvius of Leiden.”
Franz de le Boë (1614–1672) was a German-born physician, chemist, and anatomist who practiced in Holland. (As was customary, he Latinized his name, yielding “Franciscus Sylvius”: sylvius means “of the forest,” as does “de le Boë.”) In 1691, when the German physician and traveler Engelbert Kämpfer (1651–1716) found himself being questioned closely by the Japanese shogun about the most effective medicine he knew for prolonging life, he identified it as “a certain spirituous liquor which could … comfort the spirit,” newly invented. When pressed for its name, he replied “sal volatile oleosum Sylvii,” explaining in his journal that the Japanese esteemed “long and high-sounded names.”
Morewood took this “Sylvius’s oily volatile salt” to be nothing but ordinary genever, probably correctly. But while Kämpfer seems to have been referring to Sylvius’s particular formulation of the traditional Dutch spirit (genever dates back at the very least to the late 1400s), Morewood understood that as a paternity claim for the spirit in general, and most nineteenth- and twentieth-century authorities followed him without question. Only recently have drinks historians begun to correct his faulty math. See genever and gin.
Kämpfer, Engelbert. History of Japan. Translated by J. G. Scheuchzer. 1727; repr. Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906.
Morewood, Samuel. Essay on the Inventions and Customs of Both Ancients and Moderns in the Use of Inebriating Liquors. Dublin: 1824.
By: David Wondrich