The history of the elixir goes back to the beginning of the 16th century.
At the beginning of the 1500s, King Francis I of France ordered monks to create an effective herbal extract for his soldiers’ gunshot wounds caused by the Arquebuse musket.
The most effective elixir was made by the monastery of St. Anthony in Vercors, France. The monks named their herbal water after the shot of the medieval gun Arquebus (coup d’Arquebuse), so it became known as “Arquebusade Water”.
Arquebusade Water has proven to be effective not only in the treatment of physical injuries, cuts, punctures, burns, blows, sprains, bruises, abrasions and frostbite acquired during merciless fights, but it has also been successfully used in countless other areas.
The beneficial effect started to reached the civilian populations, and people started using it for their skin infections and other body pains.
This wonderful herbal elixir was introduced to posterity by Nicola Lemery in the mid-1600s.
Lemery was a prominent intellectual luminary of his time, a doctor, chemist, and King Louis XIV’s apothecary. The Arquebusade Water was also used in the royal court of Louis XIV of France. In the royal court, the ladies also loved to care for their skin and body with 100% natural herbal water.
The Arquebusade Water has been so effective and acknowledged that it has been accepted as a means of payment over the centuries.
Due to the schism and armed conflicts at the beginning of the Modern Era, the French church orders were in a difficult situation, so many monks had to leave France. Some of the monks who knew the recipe fled to Switzerland, where they continued to produce Arquebusade water and heal the people in the area.
In 1790, Fabre and Bouet, two pharmacists from Lausanne, bought the recipe from the monks and began producing and marketing Arquebusade water.
Original documents and invoice remained from Fabre & Bouet Trading House written with quill in 1791 Lausanne, Switzerland.
The trading house exported a shipment of Arquebusade Water sample products from Lausanne to 18th-century England.
Hugues Javier’s article on the sample product of the Arquebusade Elixir made by the two apothecaries Fabre & Bouet from Lausanne.
Today, the Arquebusade Water is still made in Switzerland 100% by hand, based on the hundreds of years old recipe and with the full preservation of the ancient distillation process.
We feel we must preserve this wonderful herbal preparation of the old masters, which was perfected over many centuries based on careful observations and experience and then passed on from one generation to the next generation. We cannot let this tradition be lost, so we must protect it and make it available for the people of today.
Made in Switzerland since 1516.
Since 1516.
