Background

Abstract

Since antiquity, the power of certain organic substances contained in the milky juices of some plants to relieve pain and induce sleep has captured the interest and imagination of doctors and lay people alike. This interest is reflected in the tales of poets from many countries. I will remind you here only of the occasion in the Odyssey when Helen mixes a remedy in the wine of the grieving Telemachus ’… to banish sorrow and hatred and the memory of all pain’; various tales of Boccaccio in the Decameron, e.g. the twenty-eighth story in which an abbot administered a powder to Ferondo that was said to make him sleep for three days and appear as if dead; also, the fortieth tale in the same collection; and finally Act IV, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.