Theriaca.
Theriaca was invented by Nero’s physician, Andromachus, and was devised as an improvement on Mithridatium which until then was the great antidote in Roman pharmacy. The most important addition which appeared in the new formula was the introduction of vipers. Andromachus named his electuary “Galene,” which meant tranquil, probably to suggest that it was a soothing, anodyne medicine. It soon, however, acquired its permanent name, for it is referred to as Theriaca by Pliny, who would have been a contemporary with Andromachus. Pliny, it may be remarked, was rather contemptuous of the polypharmaceutic compounds which were then becoming so popular. They were devised, he says, “ad ostentationem artis;” just to “show off,” as we should say.
Andromachus (or it may have been his son, a physician of the same name) wrote his formula, and described the virtues of his compound in Greek elegiac verses which he dedicated to Nero, and which Galen has preserved. The object of giving the formula in verse was that it should be less easy to modify it. The enumeration of the medicinal properties of the antidote left very little room for any other remedy. First it would counteract all poisons and bites of venomous animals. Besides, it would relieve all pains, weaknesses of the stomach, asthma, difficulty of breathing, phthisis, colic, jaundice, dropsy, weakness of sight, inflammation of the bladder and of the kidneys, and plague.
Galen, after describing its alexipharmic properties, states that he tested it by causing a number of fowls to be dosed with it. To these he brought others to which no theriaca had been given. The poison was administered to all. The fowls to which the theriaca had been given all survived, and all the others died. Galen’s encomiums on this compound were no doubt largely responsible for the marvellous reputation it enjoyed all through the centuries in which his authority was accepted. He declares that it resists poison and venomous bites, cures inveterate headache, vertigo, deafness, epilepsy, apoplexy, dimness of sight, loss of voice, asthma, coughs of all kinds, spitting of blood, tightness of the breath, colic, the iliac passion, jaundice, hardness of the spleen, stone, urinary complaints, fevers, dropsies, leprosies, the troubles to which women are subject, melancholy, and all pestilences.
Down to the seventeenth century these virtues were almost universally accepted, and many were the learned treatises written to explain its action; how one drug toned down the effect of others, and how the whole formed a sort of harmony in medicine. At the same time most of the old masters in pharmacy fancied they could suggest some improvement, and the original formula was modified in scores of ways.
In addition there arose new electuaries, modelled more or less closely on theriaca, but perhaps devised for some special complaints, and bearing the names of their authors. Many of these also attained to considerable fame.
For some centuries the theriaca made in turn at Constantinople, Cairo, Genoa, and Venice was in such reputation that customers would have it so branded. Ultimately the last-named city secured almost the monopoly of the manufacture. A reference to its production there occurs in Evelyn’s Diary, dated March 23, 1646. Evelyn writes: “Having packed up my purchases of books, pictures, casts, treacle, &c. (the making and extraordinary ceremony whereof I had been curious to observe, for it is extremely pompous and worth seeing), I departed from Venice.”
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth English apothecaries began to claim that they could make the confection as well as their Italian contemporaries. Some curious documents illustrating their confidence were given in an interesting research by Mr. W. G. Piper, published in The Chemist and Druggist, March 15, 1880. He quotes from William Turner, “the learned divine, daring Protestant, and first English botanist,” the title of a work on the virtues and properties of the great Triacle (published in 1568 but not now known), and also a few paragraphs from a later volume on the same subject in which, after describing the method of making the remedy, he says: “Wherefore if there be any Apothecaries in London that dare take in hande to make these noble compositions they may know where to haue them.” It appears that Hugh Morgan, the Queen’s apothecary, accepted the challenge, for in a pamphlet by him (1585) he insists that his product has been compared with other “theriacle” brought from Constantinople and Venice, and has been better commended. “It is very lamentable to consider,” he writes, “that straungers doe dayly send into England a false and naughty kinde of Mithridatium and Threacle in great barrelles more than a thousand weight in a year, and vtter ye same at a lowe price for 3d. and 4d. a pound, to ye great hurt of Her Maiesties subjects and no small game to straungers purses.”
Preparation of Theriaca.
(From Brunschwick’s “Destillir,” Strassburg, 1500.)
Reproduced (by permission) from “The Follies of Science,” by H. Carrington Bolton (Pharmaceutical Review Publishing Co., Milwaukee, U.S.A.)
Mr. Piper also quoted at length from another pamphlet published in 1612 by R. Band (in a subsequent edition, R. Browne), who relates how the Master and Wardens of the Grocers’ Company, having marked that “a filthy and unwholesome baggage composition” was being brought into this Realm as Tryacle of Genoa, “made only of the rotten garble and refuse outcast of all kinds of spices and drugs, hand over head with a little filthy molasses and tarre to worke it up withal,” communicated with the College of Physicians, and induced them to prescribe the proper formula and to superintend the manufacture, which was then entrusted to Mr. William Besse, apothecary in the Poultry. Mr. Besse had to take “a corporall oath” before the Lord Mayor, and every year when he made the confection had to show the ingredients and the product to the College of Physicians. His triacle was sold at not above 2s. 8d. per lb. or 2d. per ounce. It appears from the same pamphlet that nothing was alleged against Venice Treacle except its “excessive dearness.”
Prosper Alpinus, a Paduan physician, wrote an account of his three years’ residence at Cairo (“De Medicina Ægyptorum”) in 1591, and has much to say of the manufacture of Theriaca in that city. It was only allowed to be made in public, and the ceremony was performed once a year in the month of May in the Mosque of Morestan by the chief pharmacist of the city in the presence of all the physicians. The operator would give no information to Albinus, a Christian, about the composition; but he got what he wanted from a famous herbalist who collected all the materials for the compound. Albinus states that at that time Italians, Germans, Poles, Flemings, Englishmen, and Frenchmen came to Cairo to purchase this true Theriaca.
Theriaca (Tyriaca, as he calls it), was among the drugs recommended to Alfred the Great by Helias, the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The manuscript is quoted in “Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms” by the Rev. Oswald Cockayne. (See Vol. I, p. [124], [131].)
Many allusions in old records show how highly the confection was esteemed by those who could afford to take it. According to Buckle (“Miscell. Works,” Vol. II, p. 303) it is first mentioned in English literature by Foucher de Chartres (1124). He had come to know of it in the first crusade. A “Pixis argenti ad Tyriacum” is named in the Close Roll of King John, 1208; in the old romance of Sir Tristrem (about 1250) a man is slain by a dragon; and “His mouth opened thai And pelt treacle in that man”; the “triacle box du pere apelle une Hakette garniz d’or” is mentioned among the precious effects of Henry V; in the Paston letters written in the reign of Edward IV we find allusions to “treacle pottes of Geane (Genoa) as my potecarie swerytht on to me, and moerovyr that they were never undoo syns that they came from Geane.”
In early English books treacle was a term used metaphorically for the divinest blessings. Nothing could better prove the high appreciation in which it was held. Piers Ploughman (about 1370) writes, “Treuthe telleth that love ys tryacle for synne”; Chaucer (1340–1400) has “Crist, which is to every harm triacle”; in Coverdale’s Bible (1535) the sentence in Jeremiah viii, 22 is rendered “Is there no triacle in Gilead?”; Sir Thomas More (1573) writes of “laying up a store of cumfort in your hart as a triacle against the poyson of desperate dread”; and later Milton speaks of “the treacle of sound doctrine”; Jeremy Taylor says, “We kill the Viper and make treacle of him; that is, we not only escape from but get advantage by temptations.”
Laurens Catelan, Master Apothecary of Montpellier, and Apothecary in Ordinary to Monseigneur the Prince de Condé, has left a full report of his discourse on the occasion of his dispensing a batch of Theriaca at Montpellier on September 23, 1628. It is a most interesting lecture, full of curious old facts chiefly about poisonings, and inspired with an unshakable faith in the importance of the operation in which he was engaged. The exordium is explanatory of the ceremony:
“The regulations and statutes under which we live in this city,” says Master Catelan, “require that whenever we prepare either Theriaca, Mithridatium, Confection of Hyacinth, or Confection Alkermes, the compounding shall be done in public, and in the presence of the very illustrious professors of this famous University of Medicine, so that they may have the opportunity of censuring or approving the ingredients, and the public may therefore be assured of the fidelity of these important medicines.
“This is why I have here spread out before you all these drugs which are used in the composition of the great and famous Theriaca.
“But as I am honoured with the attendance of such an august assembly, I ought not, I think, to omit to lay before you some of the singularities associated with the history and composition of this remedy, and I will divide what I have to say on these subjects into three sections, namely—
“(1) The discoverer of this compound; (2) the purpose of the invention; and (3) the reasons why these drugs and no others of the multitude known to us have been chosen for this purpose.”
The lecturer then entered upon a history of Mithridates and his wonderful immunity against poisons; of his defeat by Pompey, of the recovery of his formula, of the additions made to it a hundred years later by Andromachus, and of the preservation of directions for making it which Galen wrote some fifty years after Andromachus had completed his invention.
At this point the book tells us there was an interval, and some music was performed. When the lecturer resumed he proceeded to tell of the risks which princes and nobles ran of being poisoned in those old times, and of the precautions taken against such crimes. Of the rings and amulets they wore, of the tasters they employed, and of the treatment such as Mithridates went through of accustoming his system to poisons to such an extent that they took no effect on him. He quotes in support of the belief in this method of ensuring immunity against poisons two or three stories from the classics which one would have thought would have been too strong even for a professional eulogist of Theriaca.
One case was that of a girl who ate spiders from her childhood, and was so fortified against poisons as not to be afraid to take any of them. A man is alluded to by Galen who would drink a cup of wine in which a live viper had been drowned. We have also the account of a girl whose system had been so saturated with aconite that an Indian king had sent her as a present to Alexander the Great in the hope that he would kiss her, and thus imbibe the poison with which her lips would be charged; but, fortunately, Aristotle saw her first, and recognised by her flaming eyes that she was filled with some sort of poison, and thus the Indian’s purpose was frustrated.
After another interval and some more music, the lecturer came to the third part of his subject, in which he expounded the special virtues of the drugs before him. These were grouped, and it was shown that some were good for the brain, others for the chest, for the stomach, for the kidneys, the heart, and other organs. Others, like the viper’s flesh, were directly sympathetic with poisons, and would go straight for them if they were inside the body, or would lie in wait for them, as it were, if they were only expected. When the subject was exhausted, it was announced that in consequence of the lateness of the hour the weighing of the ingredients would be postponed till the next day. That ceremony was duly performed on the 24th of September, and the drugs were passed on to a “pulveriser.” It was not until the 16th of November that the final mixing was undertaken.