CAPITAL: The Voice of Business Issue 1, 2015 | Page 71

COPPER

To help improve the
health of its staff, a
Pietermaritzburg
company is using what
NHS hospitals in Britain
are calling an ‘emerging
technology’. In fact, it’s
an ancient knowledge, the
benefits of which are only
now being
fully realised.
WORDS BY

Barry du Plessis

I

t was possibly one of the more significant happy accidents of the Bronze
Age: the discovery of the “magical”
properties of copper and its alloys. The
metal was found to have miraculous powers of healing and could prevent infection
in an age before any antibiotics or other
modern medical wonders.
Ancient people found that it magically
improved the quality of water (unearthed
copper-rich water pitchers in the pyramids
show that the Egyptians knew this), while
the Aztecs’ use of copper for medical instruments, and copper-infused medicinal
preparations found at other ancient sites
show that people from prehistory were
very aware of copper’s healing powers.
Best of all, these magical powers were
never exhausted or weakened over time. At
a time when there was no understanding
of microbes or how they cause disease,
copper was indeed a godsend.
And then we seem to have largely
forgotten about it.
It was only in 1893 that the Swiss
Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli discovered the
oligodynamic effect, an ability of certain
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