theriac old use

Patients would use theriac for bites but also as a preventative against any kind of poisoning and eventually against just about anything.

Greek physician Galen devoted a whole book Theriaké to theriac.

By the time of the Renaissance, the making of theriac had become an official ceremony, especially in Italy.

An updated recipe called theriac (Theriacum Andromachi) was known well into the 19th century.

A corresponding English noun theriac also exists.

The formula for theriac included as many as 600 separate ingredients and was kept secret for over seventeen centuries.

If theriac failed to produce results, he said, it was because the physicians and pharmacists of his own time lacked the knowledge to compound it.

The manufacture of antidotes called mithridate or theriac (English "treacle") continued into the nineteenth century.

The production of a proper theriac took months with all the collection and fermentation of herbs and other ingredients.

Maranta maintained that theriac had been tested on criminals condemned to death and was proven in antiquity to be infallible.

He prepared a widely-read treatise on the Black Death, recommending theriac among other prophylaxis, but died of the plague himself.

Lise Manniche, however, links the origins of theriac to the ancient Egyptian kyphi recipe, which was also used medicinally.

Hence, remedies made of contemptible creatures contained greater medicinal virtues than such 'precious' drugs like theriac (which to Nicholas was just snake meat).

However, there is a reference in Galen's treatise "On Theriac to Piso" (which may however be spurious) to events of 204.

In 667, ambassadors from Rûm presented the Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty in China with a theriac.

Thinking by analogy, Henry Grosmont also thought of theriac as a moral curative, the medicine "to make a man reject the poisonous sin which has entered into his soul."

According to legends, the history of theriac begins with the king Mithridates VI of Pontus who experimented with poisons and antidotes on his prisoners.

Of the theriaca (On Theriac to Piso) De Theriaca, ad Pisonem (Ther.

Maranta conducted experiments in the natural history museum of Ferrante Imperato on the proportion of wine needed to dissolve the ingredients for theriac, claiming that "it preserves the healthy" and "cures the sick."

Galen called the antidote "theriac" and presented versions by Aelius (used by Julius Caesar), Andromachus (physician to Nero), Antipater, Nicostratus, and Damocratis.

"In this world," that messenger of penance continued, "you are used to seeing that for every ill a remedy is found, that there is no wound without its balm, no venom without its theriac.

In 1669, the famous French apothecary, Moyse Charas, published the formula for theriac, seeking to break the monopoly held by the Venetians at that time on the medication, thereby opening up the transfer of medical information.

Since the plague, and notably the Black Death, was believed to have been sent by God as a punishment for sin and had its origins in pestilential serpents that poisoned the rivers, theriac was a particularly appropriate remedy or therapeutic.

But theriac was a controversial drug; in the 1570s, two physicians were expelled from the College of Physicians in Brescia for overprescribing it, and Maranta had to fend off criticism for substituting an ingredient in the formula.

At the time of the Black Death in the mid 14th century, Gentile da Foligno, who died of the plague in June 1348, recommended in his plague treatise that the theriac should have been aged at least a year.