For nearly 2,000 years, people living in the Near East and Europe relied on one miracle medicine to protect themselves poison, plague, and a host of other maladies. This magical cure-all was known as theriac—a black, sticky substance crafted from dozens of ingredients, including black pepper, bread, opium, and viper flesh.
Theriac eventually faded into history with the rise of modern medicine, but a team of Polish researchers has now re-created theriac from a 17th-century apothecary recipe to study the miraculous claims that surround the cure.
An ancient remedy
Theriac was a hit in 17th century Poland. But its popularity and reach went far beyond Eastern Europe, and the idea of a “universal antidote” stretches all the way back to antiquity. Ancient sources like Galen and Pliny suggest that versions of theriac existed from at least the second century B.C., and their popularity soon spread in elite circles.
Among the most famous seekers of cure-all was Mithridates VI Eupator, an Anatolian emperor and noteworthy opponent of ancient Rome who ruled from 120 to 63 B.C. Mithridates was obsessed with poisons and their cures.
“Arsenic was called the powder of succession at the time,” says Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar in Stanford University’s department of classics who was not involved in the study. In her biography of Mithridates, she tracks how that obsession sparked an expensive hunt for a way to evade poisoning—leading to the creation of a lasting theriac recipe.
Haunted by the possibility of poisoning and in consultation with medical experts from far and wide, Mithridates delved into the human body’s ability to become immune to certain poisons by ingesting small amounts of toxins over time, a concept known in modern medicine as mythridatism.
“It’s all in the dosage,” says Major. And Mithridates’ daily dose of poison-laced theriac seemed to work: He died by suicide at 70 after poisoning his daughters. Though the recipe he used is lost, it appears to have been passed to other nobles, whose court doctors brewed and experimented with it. Though their recipes varied—and dabbled in a vast variety of expensive ingredients—the basic makeup of theriac usually included honey, spices like cinnamon and cardamom, and a variety of herbs, barks, oils, and even wood. At some point after Mithridates, poison was removed from its long list of ingredients.
Nevertheless, theriac became a daily must-have for paranoid monarchs from Nero—whose court doctor replaced Mithradates’ snake venom in the medicinal mixture with viper flesh—to Elizabeth I. Mayor notes that the opium that later became standard in such mixtures “really ensured patient compliance.”
An everyday antidote
Theriac’s royal heritage was part of its appeal, and it eventually became a widely available, though expensive, remedy for everyday people. For the cost of a chicken, Jakub Węglorz, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wrocław, explains, a 17th-century Polish plebeian could buy some of the substance from a licensed apothecary who had been trained for that purpose.
For Węglorz, who studies the history of medicine and the early modern era, it wasn’t enough to read about theriac in medical textbooks—he wanted to see if it was possible to make the kind of theriac that was sold in Poland centuries ago. With funding from Poland’s National Science Center, he teamed up with another historian and two pharmacists to try to reconstruct a 400-year-old theriac. It would be the first time modern researchers with a pharmaceutical background attempted to make theriac—and the first complete reconstruction and analysis of the drug.
They relied on a 1630 recipe from Paul Guldenius, the city apothecary of what is now Toruń, Poland. Guldenius was one of a small group of apothecaries licensed to produce and sell theriac, and like his colleagues, he prepared the brew in public with what the researchers call “much pomp and ceremony.”
These acts of public theriac production were a way to ensure total transparency about what went into the medicine, and a way to advertise to a curious public. “They displayed all of these precious, costly ingredients” during public preparations, says Mayor.
Written in Latin, Guldenius’ recipe lists the names and quantities of 61 ingredients. Węglorz and his team worked to decode the Latin and common names of the compounds used, cross-checking the recipe with contemporary books and other texts like diaries and letters.
Luckily, Guldenius was a thorough recipe writer, including the exact weights of the theriac components. Cardamom, allspice, wood, sweet wine, and wheat bread were all part of the potion. But his theriac wasn’t just a catch-all. It had two vital ingredients that were key to both its effectiveness and its prestige: opium and viper flesh. Opium would have had an analgesic effect, while viper flesh was supposed to confer immunity to snake bites and have a “drying” effect on the body. According to the theory of bodily “humors” widely accepted at the time, spicy and intense flavors had the ability to “dry out” humors that predisposed a person to illness or infirmity.
Recreating theriac
It took four years to collect the ingredients needed to recreate Guldenius’ brew. First, the researchers turned to suppliers of pharmaceutical-grade raw materials. But some of the herbs and spices were unavailable or not grown in the European Union, so the researchers either sought out the plant itself or used garden websites to source ingredients.
Theriac based on a 1630 recipe from Paul Guldenius, the city apothecary of what is now Toruń, Poland.
Photograph Courtesy Dr. Danuta Raj
“Even for something simple, like saffron or mint, we would get the plant on our own or buy it from a certified supplier, not from a grocery store,” says Węglorz.
Then there was the issue of viper flesh: The team didn’t want to kill snakes themselves, and Poland isn’t exactly known for its abundance of reptiles. But vipers do live in its mountainous regions, and Węglorz traversed Poland by car, following tips from foresters who alerted him when they found a viper that had died of natural causes or became roadkill. Eventually, the team obtained almost seven ounces of fresh viper flesh, which was dried and then incorporated into the theriac.
Opium has proven even trickier. Poland’s drug policies are strict, though individuals can get permission to grow opium poppies. The team is still trying to legally obtain 3.5 ounces of the drug, which was excluded from the brew for now.
After studying the potential effects of the theriac ingredients—many known for their therapeutic properties—the researchers got to work in a lab at the University of Wrocław, boiling, mixing, drying, and adding in the components. It took two days for the pharmaceutical experts to combine the ingredients, cooking them down over low heat. The result, a sticky molasses-like clump, would have been segmented into small pills that patients combined with water or wine, but scholars note that theriac was also sometimes used on the skin or in the eyes. They produced 9 pounds of theriac, which was then set aside to mature for a full year.
“We didn’t taste it,” says Węglorz. “But if we did, we could say the taste is really warming. It’s hot. It’s spicy. It has the taste of tar.” The inclusion of herbs and spices like cinnamon, valerian, lavender, and black pepper seem to confer a whiskey-like burn to the concoction, which other scholars surmise was part of the medicine’s appeal.
Though theriac contains ingredients that do have properties that can help human health, the researchers believe the placebo effect, helped along by royal influencers who relied on the drug, was behind most of theriac’s purported ability to counteract poison and keep a person in good health. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth recreating—both Mayor and Węglorz note that theriac is important evidence for the extent of scientific inquiry and folk remedies in antiquity and beyond.
Now, Węglorz’s team is looking at variations of theriac that incorporated popular substances whose use came and went over time. Like us, people of the past were susceptible to medical fads—even if those fads involved opium, viper flesh, and a spicy black substance rumored to cure kings and peasants alike.
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