Dedicatory Letter

...and feel it as antiquity did. For even if we have their names handed down in records, and even if the antidotes themselves are found prepared in apothecary shops, they do not provide those effects and powers which their names promise, and which the ancients recorded them to provide. The reason for this discrepancy is undoubtedly that many noble and precious aromatic spices original: "aromata" are missing for us—those legitimate and most excellent ones which Mithridates, Attalus, Andromachus, Galen, and many other ancients used to mix into their antidotes. These spices were brought to Rome from the regions of the Arabs, Ethiopians, Troglodytes A term used by ancient geographers for various cave-dwelling peoples, often located in the Red Sea region or Africa., and various other nations by the Emperors of that most flourishing age, with great expense, study, and labor.

In Rome, however, no one except the Imperial Physicians (as Galen admits) was permitted to prepare the true and legitimate Theriac A famous ancient "universal antidote" containing dozens of ingredients, including viper flesh, intended to cure all poisons., unless someone perhaps had been gifted those noble aromatics by the Emperors through the favor of powerful men. This is the main reason we should not wonder if the Theriac of our current use, as well as the Mithridatic Antidote Named after King Mithridates VI of Pontus, who was said to have developed a legendary complex potion to make himself immune to all poisons., do not possess the same strength that their names promise and ancient writings testify.

Certainly, it is agreed that human life has been dealt with quite unhappily in this regard, insofar as it has suffered the loss of the greatest remedies against poisons and other most serious ailments to which it is liable and often afflicted. For this reason, in this age of ours, in which almost everything else seems to be led back to its original brightness and restored to its integrity, that Supreme Pontiff, that unconquered Emperor, that most serene King, that magnanimous Prince, or that most wise Senate of any Republic could be called glorious and truly most fortunate, who—imitating those Roman Emperors and other most powerful Kings with their own natural gifts—would allow themselves to be weighed down by no expenses or labors. Instead, they would apply all study, all effort, and finally all their resources, so that the aromatic spices lost for so long, which we entirely lack for making Antidotes, might be brought back into the light.

Indeed, if any of these leaders were to do so, or if all were to strive to do it, they would not only look after their own lives and those of other mortals, and deserve great credit from posterity, but they would also achieve eternal fame from this. For posterity would forever attribute that benefit to its own authors with the highest praise.

For my part, if this was not permitted to me, I have at least tried to provide what I could with all my study and industry. For when I saw the people of this our age involved in the same dangers of life as those of old—and even greater ones—yet we lack those true and noble antidotes of the ancients because of the legitimate and excellent simple medicines Medicinal herbs or substances used on their own, rather than in complex mixtures. missing in them today, I wanted to try whether antidotes could be prepared from the legitimate ones we do have, which might compensate for the lack of the others.

I did this indeed with great labor and long use and experience of things; but whether I have achieved what I strove for, I do not know. This I could certainly admit: those have always seemed to me to provide the powers of Theriac and the Mithridatic antidote far more successfully than those which are made everywhere (with few exceptions) in this time under the same name. But I have not neglected that in this, as in the rest, the judgment should be that of others rather than my own; since, with that spirit of deserving well which I have always had, in our Commentaries on the sixth book of Dioscorides, I have not only illustrated Dioscorides himself as much as I could, but I have also described certain subsequent antidotes discovered by us.

Antidotes which ought to be used and those which ought not.

But I would not want some to think because of this that one should abstain from the use of every Theriac and Mithridatic Antidote at this time; for I mean one should abstain only from those which are sold everywhere, and concerning whose composition there is no testimony from the most approved physicians, and of which a huge quantity is held by impostors. For I know there are in Italy, in famous cities, Pharmacopœos Apothecaries or pharmacists who prepared and sold medicinal drugs. eager for honor and human health, who, sparing no expenses or labors, devote all their effort and apply all study so that all the legitimate simple medicines with which these antidotes are pre-