In minimal doses the colocynth is a violent purgative; 
in larger doses it is lethal. It happens that we know the 
history of this drug in surprising detail. In the first cen- 
tury of the Christian era the upper classes of Rome were 
much concerned with their health: hypochondriasis was 
rampant, and miracle drugs were being discovered one 
after the other.” In A.D. 43, when Claudius led a cam- 
paign into Britain, one Scribonius Largus was serving as 
an army surgeon with his forces. Some scholars have 
assumed that he then rose to the status of the Emperor’s 
private physician and that he was in attendance on Mes- 
salina. However this may be, it seems certain that C. 
Julius Callistus, a freedman who became a_ powerful 
favorite of Claudius, encouraged Scribonius to assemble 
and circulate a book of prescriptions, drawing these writ- 
ings to the attention of the Emperor. They are the 
earliest of such writings that have come down to us in 
Latin literature, and they must have exerted considera- 
ble influence on the medical practice of that age. Among 
them Prescription 106 employs colocynth, which Scribo- 
nius called by its Greek name, showing that it was at 
that time a novelty introduced from the East. It proba- 
bly enjoyed considerable vogue among the elite and 
fashionable of Rome in the middle of the first century. 
In the desperate extremity of that turbulent night of 
October 12, A.D. 54, when the Greek physician Xeno- 
phon was called in consultation and permitted himself 
to become a particeps criminis, it was natural for him to 
come to the rescue of Locusta and Agrippina by dis- 
patching Claudius with an overdose of colocynth, ad- 
“Some of the drugs used in imperial Rome have survived in use 
until recent times. One such is the agaric, and another is colocynth, 
this latter having been the base for ‘general issue’ purgative pills in 
the British army in the first world war. We too, in the mid-20th 
century, are witnessing a spate of miraculous pharmaceutical discover- 
ies. Will a single one of them be remembered in A.D. 3850? 
(126 | 
