The Anatomia Auri was written in 1628 by the alchemist writer, composer and Doctor of medicine Johann Daniel Mylius (1583 – 1642). The works speaks of the creation of a golden elixir of life, and the recipes for the use of gold as a medicine and cure all. Alchemy, chemistry and medicine all fitted within the same frame in the 17th century; the development of early  laboratory techniques, theory, terminology, and experimental methods by alchemists, eventually led to the founding of modern chemistry in the 18th and 19th centuries, based on the revolutionary discoveries by Robert Boyle (1627–1691), Antoine Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794),  Joseph Priestley (24 March 1733 – 6 February 1804) and John Dalton, (6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844).
The image has been hand colored from historical recreations of color pigments available at the time of its original publication.