Mandragora
From an MS. of the XV century
Mandragora as an anæsthetic
The first mention of mandragora (Mandragora Atropa, L.), as an anæsthetic, is made by Dioscorides (ca. A.D. 100), who evidently recognised the difference between the hypnotic and anæsthetic effects of the drug, from which one may assume that it was employed for both purposes in the medical practice of that day. Respecting the former, he states: “Eating which [mandragora] shepherds are made sleepy,” and, referring to the latter property, he remarks that “three wine-glassfuls of a liquid preparation of the root are given to those who are about to be cut or burnt, for they do not feel the pain.”
Of the preparations of mandragora, he gives the following: “There are those who boil the root in wine to a third part, and preserve the decoction, of which they give a cyathus [small glass] in want of sleep or severe pains in any part, and also before operations with the knife, or the actual cautery, that they may not be felt”; also “a wine is prepared from the bark of the root, without boiling, and three pounds of it are put in a cadus [eighteen gallons] of sweet wine; of this, three cyathi are given to those who require to be cut or cauterised, when, being thrown into a deep sleep, they do not feel any pain.”
“Morion,” a Grecian anæsthetic
Dioscorides also refers to a substance called “morion,” believed to be the white seed of the mandragora root, which is mentioned also by Pliny as a narcotic poison. “A drachm of it,” he states, “taken in a draught, or in a cake or other food, causes infatuation, and takes away the use of the reason; the person sleeps without sense, in the attitude in which he ate it, for three or four hours afterwards. Physicians use it when they have to resort to cutting or burning.”
These allusions serve to prove how frequently anæsthesia was practised by the physicians of antient Greece, to whom the narcotic property of mandragora, which is allied to Atropa Belladonna, or deadly nightshade, was well known.
Gathering Mandragora