Flamel

Holy crap!

Nicolas Flamel was a real person!

I subscribe to the near-daily interesting tidbit site of KnowledgeNews. Once you have a subscription (or a lifetime one as I do), they send you an email detailing various interesting bits of knowledge, typically based on current events.

Today's current event was a discussion of the history of alchemy, inspired by the opening of the fifth Harry Potter film.

In particular,

In 1382, alchemist Nicolas Flamel insisted he had created
gold with the help of a mystical Hebrew text. Flamel was
full of it, but his contemporaries had actually begun to
discover something useful: nitric, hydrochloric, and
sulfuric acids--all highly corrosive substances with
serious scientific promise. And monks were tapping alchemy
for medicine, applying what they had learned while
translating alchemical texts to create herbal and mineral
cures.

Way cool, and quite entertaining.