In the last century BCE there was a small kingdom on the southern edge of the Black Sea, called “Pontus.” They fought several wars with Rome, but in later centuries the kingdom was chiefly remembered for Mithridates IV, the king of Pontus. Courtly life in Pontus being what it was (not very nice), Mithridates was wary of being poisoned. His solution was to build up an immunity by taking very small amounts of known poisons and progressively taking bigger doses. By all reports this scheme worked, and Mithridates was eventually able to tolerate lethal doses of any of them.
A mere seventeen hundred years later, in 1653, Nicholas Culpeper published his book “English Physician Enlarged.” He included a recipe for a compound including ten drams of Myrrh, Saffron, Agarick, Ginger, Cinnamon, Spikenard, Frankincense, Treacle, and Mustard seeds. To that you were instructed to add schenanth, stoechas, galbanum, costus, turpentine, pepper, castorium, cubebs, troch, cypheos, bdelium, gum arabic, macedonian parsley seeds, opium, cardamoms, fennel seed, gentian, dittany, annis seeds, asarabacca, orris acorus, valerian, sagapen, and several other ingredients. You mix all that stuff with wine and honey, and what you have in your enlightened English physician hands is a “mithridate,” which Culpeper said was a generalized antidote to poison!
Culpeper was particularly convincing in his description of the effects of the mithridate:
“It is good against poison and such as have done themselves wrong by taking filthy medicines, it provokes sweat, it helps continual waterings of the stomach, ulcers in the body, consumptions, weakness of the limbs, rids the body of cold humours, and diseases coming of cold, it remedies cold infirmities of the brain, and stopping of the passage of the senses, by cold, it expels wind, helps the colic, provokes appetite to one’s victuals, it helps ulcers in the bladder, as also difficulty of urine, it casts out the dead child, and helps such women as cannot conceive by reason of cold, it is an admirable remedy for melancholy, and all diseases of the body coming through cold, it would fill a whole sheet of paper to reckon them all up particularly.”
It’s not clear why, with a remedy like that, there was anything else included in his book. Unfortunately it may not be possible today to reproduce the miraculous stuff, because not all of the herbs he specifies are known nowadays. “Cubebs,” for example, was once a substitute for black pepper but good luck finding it now. As for some of the others, nobody seems to be sure what he was talking about.
There’s always the possibility that Culpeper was being overly panglossian, of course, even though at the time nobody would have called him that. They wouldn’t have used the word because “panglossian” didn’t exist until the following century, when Voltaire wrote “Candide,” which includes the character Dr. Pangloss. Pangloss was named from the Greek words “pan” (all) and “glossa” (language), suggesting a character who was a bit too talkative. Pangloss was old and unrealistic, claiming that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” even though he continued (in the book) to experience great misfortune. Candide was a huge international bestseller in the 1700s, and it didn’t take long for “panglossian” to enter English as a term for anyone talking up something in an overly optimistic and unrealistic way.
So what’s survived is a word describing someone who talks too much, and what’s been lost is a recipe to cure any kind of poisoning. Typical, right?
