Magnets and garlic: an enduring antipathy in early-modern science

Abstract

Since antiquity, sources report that garlic deprives a magnet of its power of attraction. Although in later centuries some authors disproved or questioned this effect by experience or trial, several, if not the majority of, writers referred to garlic and magnets as “enemies” until well into the seventeenth century. It will be argued that the probable textual origin of the “garlic effect” is a corrupt or ambiguous passage in Pliny’s Natural History, reading “al(l)ium” (garlic) instead of “aliud” (another) in one passage. With a focus on the early-modern period, it will be elucidated why so many authors did not doubt this physical effect, and some even presented causal explanations for it. It shall be emphasized, moreover, that magnetic attraction, and thereby also the garlic effect, was used as an important example or analogy since antiquity. This illustrative or explanatory use of analogies drawn from the garlic–magnet antipathy certainly goes some way towards explaining the longevity of this odd relation between the two substances.