# Theriac

**Teriaca**

**Known today as.** The great compound antidote of antiquity, with about sixty ingredients in Galen’s formulation, including viper flesh and opium; Venice was a celebrated center of its manufacture.

Kind: Compound  
Qualities: Counted hot, like the mithridate, of which Culpeper warns that two drams may be dangerous “because of its heat”; he gives the treacle for coldness of the stomach, wind, and the colic.  
Poisoning: Opioid poisoning (https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/poisons/opioid)

## What did Canale use it for?

Praised at a dram at a time, continued over a course; in a distilled water and in the cockerel (ch. 6; note XLI).

## What does modern science say?

Its reputation as a universal antidote does not survive; it remained in continental pharmacopoeias well into the nineteenth century.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **morphine**: from the opium: twenty-four drachms of Theban opium in the London recipe of 1653, more than in the mithridate
- **viper flesh**: made into troches with bread
- **scillaren**: from the squill
- **myrrh, saffron, cinnamon, cassia, pepper, and some fifty aromatics**: 
- **honey**: 

**Mechanism.** Fifty-five ingredients in Galen’s account and sixty-one in the London Pharmacopoeia of 1746, kept for years before use: the opium is what acted, and Heberden judged these compounds to be given chiefly as opiates and aromatics, counteracting no poison further than plain opium would. Its public compounding in Venice, Bologna, and other cities, with the ingredients inspected, Griffin takes for the beginning of medicines regulation.

**Dose.** Culpeper allows half a dram to go about one’s business, a dram or more to sweat; Heberden warned that the opium in a dose lay at the mercy of the mixer, and that fermentation in the mass was said to make it three or four times stronger.

**Standing.** The 1746 London Pharmacopoeia was the last to contain it, but it was still in the German Pharmacopoeia of 1872 and the French of 1884; in England it was called Venetian treacle, and by the twentieth century ‘theriac’ in advertisements seemed to mean syrupy treacle.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Andromachus.** Nero’s physician refined the antidote of Mithridates and added the flesh of vipers, making the *theriac* (from *thēr*, a wild beast) of later medicine.

**Galen.** Physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius, gave its recipe and making in his books on antidotes, held that it should be kept twelve years before use, and records that the emperor took it within two months of its compounding without ill effect.

**Venice.** Made and exported theriac from the twelfth century; its public compounding, with the ingredients displayed for officials to check and the product stamped under supervision, made Venetian treacle famous across Europe.

## Sources

- Manganyi, M. C., et al. (2021). Bulbous plants *Drimia*: “a thin line between poisonous and healing compounds” with biological activities. *Pharmaceutics* 13: 1385.
- Griffin, J. P. (2004). “Venetian treacle and the foundation of medicines regulation.” *British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology* 58.

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*Theriac.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/theriac

Historical description, not medical advice.