Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Triaca!

"The Venetians had begun manufacturing triaca in the Middle Ages, taking advantage of their window on the east to fill it with ingredients to which other European countries didn't have access. By law, members of the magistrato alia sanita, the department of public health, had to be present when the apothecary ground and mixed these ingredients. The public was sometimes invited to attend too, the apothecary's shop with its impressive jars on burnished wood shelves an appealing locale for a show. Once the health department had certified the treacle as authentic, the druggist was allowed to hang the Venetian flag, the lion of Saint Mark the Evangelist, outside to alert the world that a new batch of treacle was on sale. The hocus-pocus of government certification turned treacle into a patented brand that Venice could ship to the rest of Europe at a good profit.
Treacle's most important ingredient was viper's flesh-"the base and foundation...without which you can absolutely not concoct it," as the great sixteenth-century Bolognese physician Aldrovandi wrote. The theory, enshrined in the work of Galen himself, was that it took a poison to counteract a poison. Since fever was a poison in the body, you needed an equally potent venom to stop it. The best (and most expensive) viper'
s flesh happened to come from the Euganean Hills near Padua, on Venetian territory."

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