Glauber was born in poverty and did not have the conditions to go to college for further study, so he decided to take the road of self-examination. When glauber was just an adult, he left home and wandered around Europe. While looking for a job, he learned from the society. Unfortunately, glauber got relapsing fever in Nablus. The disease greatly reduced his appetite and seriously damaged his digestive ability. Seeing that glauber is getting weaker every day, but he has no money to treat him, the kind shopkeeper told him that there is a vineyard about 10 km outside Nablus and a well near the garden. Drinking water from the well can cure diseases. Glauber was tortured by illness. Although he was dubious, he decided to give it a try. Strangely, after drinking well water, he suddenly wanted to eat. So he ate bread while drinking water, and finally ate a big piece of bread. Soon, glauber recovered from his illness and became strong. When he got home, he told his relatives and friends about this strange thing. Everyone says it must be divine water, and God is protecting him! Glauber naturally doesn't believe this, but how to explain it? It's like a kind of magic that haunts glauber all the time. One day, he finally couldn't bear it, went to Nablus again and got back the "divine water". Throughout the winter, mirabilite didn't go anywhere, and closed the door to concentrate on the study of Shenshui. When he was analyzing the salt in the water, he found a substance called mirabilite. Glauber believes that mirabilite cured him. So Glauber's salt firmly grasped the substance Glauber's salt and did a lot of research, and learned that it has a slight antidiarrheal effect and mild medicinal properties. Because people have always had a view that dredging intestines is of great benefit to health, mirabilite thinks that it has made a major discovery in medicine, calling it "divine water" and "divine salt", and later called it "panacea". He believes that drinking this "magic water" will make him well.
This happened around 1625. Chemistry has not yet become a science, and glauber's interest in panacea is still alchemist. 1648, glauber lived in a house once occupied by an alchemist and turned that place into a chemical laboratory. In the laboratory, special stoves and other equipment are set up, and various compounds are made with secret recipes and sold as drugs, including what we now call liquid organic substances such as acetone and benzene.
Glauber is worthy of being an enlightenment chemist. As for the "panacea" mirabilite discovered by Sodium Sulfate in those years, it is now clear that it is sodium sulfate containing ten crystals of water. Sodium sulfate is generally used as a mild laxative in medicine, and it is widely used in chemical industry: glass, paper making, soap, detergent, textile, leather making and so on. All these require a lot of sodium sulfate; Used as flux in metallurgical industry; Sodium sulfate can also be used to make other sodium salts.
You see, if glauber thought everything was normal after he recovered, he wouldn't have found so many things in the future! In order to commemorate the achievements of mirabilite, people also call it "mirabilite".
It should be noted that the medical efficacy of mirabilite is recorded in Treatise on Febrile Diseases written by Zhang Zhongjing in Han Dynasty, synopsis of the golden chamber and the famous doctor's Bielu written by Tao Hongjing in Jin Dynasty. So we in China should be the first to discover the medicinal efficacy of mirabilite. It's a pity that we can't study it further by scientific methods.