The Materia Medica and the New Herbal

In 1585 Castore Durante, a physician of Rome, explained how the mandrake trade really worked. The little root-men sold to barren women as a cure were, he writes, "roots of the stalks of bryony, and of other plants, carved into that shape and made with art, and then planted again with grains of barley set about the places where they wish those little roots to grow that make the hair, the beard, and the other hairs." The mandrake's beard was barley, sprouting where the carver had set it.

He doesn't throw out the real plant with the fraud, though. A few lines on he gives a wine of the root bark for anyone about to lose a limb or be cauterized, "for, sleeping deeply, they feel no pain at all," and he warns that in too great a quantity it is "altogether deadly." The same plant serves as the surgeon's anesthetic and the quack's prop, in a single chapter.

B. C. P. Statema
27 October 2026