Blends and mixtures of spices and herbs have been around since pre-medieval times for medicinal, culinary, spiritual and erotic purposes.
The oldest mixtures are medical preparations, and herbs and spices feature quite significantly in many of them – concoctions, decoctions (a liquor concentrated by boiling down), tinctures (an extract dissolved in alcohol), electuaries (substances mixed with honey), powders, salves, balsams and liniments and the like.
It is quite amazing that many of the medical mixtures described by ancient Greek and Roman physicians featured almost unchanged in the first European national pharmacopoeia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The list of such preparations runs into the hundreds or thousands, but several are noteworthy for their persistence through time as well as their sometimes bizarre compositions. In the first London Pharmacopoeia of 1618 there were 211 preparations with more than ten ingredients, with the most complex one containing 130 substances! One of these was mithridatium (see overleaf), itself containing fifty substances!Wootton described the four ‘officinal capitals’ – ancient drugs that persisted in the medical literature for many centuries or millennia.1
Mithridatium was a highly complex poison antidote dating to Mithridates VI of the first century BCE Roman Anatolia. It was much sought after through medieval times. The recipe quoted by Wootton has fifty ingredients.
Venice Treacle (the most famous version was made there from medieval times) or ‘Theriac’ was an ancient Greek concoction also used as a poison antidote. It was invented by the first-century CE Greek physician Andromachus. Galen paid close attention to Theriaca Andromachi (and mithridatium) in his books on antidotes.2 It contained many herbs and spices and – importantly – the flesh of vipers, on the basis that poison itself (or the animal that produced it) would be the best treatment for poison. Dried scorpion could also be used.
Like a good wine, theriac was aged for the best effect. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English apothecaries started to make it themselves, and a 1612 pamphlet mocked the imported product saying it was ‘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’.3Philonium was invented by Philon of Tarsus in the first century CE and was also quoted by Galen. It was a treatment for colic and included saffron, white pepper, euphorbium (a resin), henbane, pyrethrum, spikenard and opium, mixed with honey. It has persisted through history and was present in the first London Pharmocopoeia of the seventeenth century, and remained in English circulation until 1867 (Wootton), its popularity undoubtedly a result of the opium. Later versions included ginger and caraway seeds.
Diascordium was a product of the sixteenth-century Italian physician Hieronymus Frascatorius, who claimed it as a preventative against plague.4 The original formula contained cinnamon, true scordium, Cretan dittany, bistort galbanum, gum arabic, storax, opium, sorrel seeds, gentian, Armenian bole, sealed earth, long pepper, ginger, clarified honey and canary (plant). It also evolved into a popular household medicine (on account of the opium) and was used to soothe children in the eighteenth century.
Other long-standing medicines include Elixir Proprietatis, which used saffron, aloes, myrrh … and sulphuric acid! The latter was later (wisely) replaced by vinegar. Saffron, myrrh and aloes were also sometimes used in Balsam of Sulphur, a treatment for coughs and chest complaints, and required sulphur to be boiled with olive oil or walnut oil. According to Wootton, Hiera Picra may have been the oldest medicine still in existence, a purgative dating back to the first century BCE. The earliest recipe included aloes, mastic, saffron, Indian nard, carpobalsamum and asarum; later versions added or substituted cardamom, cinnamon/canella, ginger, long pepper, various herbs and honey, but aloes were the essential constant.
Numerous kinds of hiera are listed by Paulus of Aegina.5 In the British Medical Journal correspondence of 1911, a Dr Dimmock observed that ‘the common method of taking it is in gin’.6Laudanum is a tincture of opium used as a painkiller that was invented by the Swiss chemist Paracelsus in the sixteenth century.7 There were some odd constituents: henbane juice, mummy, salts of pearls and corals, the ‘bone of the heart of a stag’, bezoar stone, amber, musk, unicorn. Later versions variously included the more conventional saffron, cinnamon, nutmeg or cloves.
Bizarre mixtures of ground-up precious stones, metals and spices were particularly popular in ancient pharmacopoeia. Confection of Hyacinth was a powdered zircon-based astringent remedy, which in addition included a truly fantastic mix of sapphires, emeralds, topaz, pearls, silk, gold and silver leaf, musk, ambergris, myrrh, camphor, coral and some vegetables, made into a cordial with syrup of carnations!8 Alchermes is a liquor that had its origins in eighth-century Italy – its bright red colour comes from cochineal and it is comprised of spirits infused with cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and sugar.