From time immemorial this substance has been considered an efficacious remedy in mania. The Greeks pretended that the daughters of Proetus, smitten with insanity by Bacchus, were restored to reason by the shepherd Melampus, who gave them some milk drawn from goats that had eaten hellebore. It is supposed that the use of purgatives arose from this fabulous tradition, whence this plant was called melampodium.

The ancients described two varieties, the white and the black. The first, according to Theophrastus, was found on a part of Mount Œta called Pyra, on which the body of Hercules was burnt. It is not certain whether they confounded our hellebore with our veratrum. Pinel supposes that the veratrum album was their hellebore, as it is not probable that the veratrum nigrum should have been thus confounded. Tournefort, in his travels in the Levant, fancied that he had discovered the root of the ancients in one that the Turks called zopteme, which answered in its character to the description recorded in older writers.

Howbeit, it was considered a powerful purgative and emetic, especially indicated in the treatment of mental affections. Celsus forbade its exhibition in summer and during the winter, or whenever febrile symptoms were prevalent. This precaution, however, applied to all purgative medicines; and to this day, in several parts of the continent, similar injunctions are usual; and even in France practitioners of the old school prepare a patient several days before any opening medicine is given,—a learned precaution, that has but too frequently rendered every medicine useless.

The exhibition of this drug was a matter of so much importance amongst the ancients, that it was specifically termed helleborism; and it was considered of so powerful a nature in mania, that the treatment of the malady was called navigare Anticyras, since it was near the town of Anticyras that the plant was generally gathered. If this process of helleborism proved efficacious, it is more than probable that its beneficial results proceeded from the violent evacuations that preceded it. The following was the mode adopted with the helleborised: The patient was first well fed for several days until the decline of the moon, when a powerful emetic was given to him; five days after a similar dose was prescribed, and then good living ordered for a month: at the expiration of this invigorating respite, emetics began again to work him every three days. After the last attack on his digestive head-quarters, he was bathed, fed again, and hellebore was given after he had been submitted to several hours’ friction with olive oil. The emetics were invariably administered on a full stomach, which was cleared either by medicine or the excitement of the beard of a quill poked down the unfortunate patient’s throat. At other times, (by way, no doubt, of variety,) rejection was excited by making the patient eat a pound or more of horseradish; after which he was walked about for some time; and then, after a short repose, the fingers or the quill were brought into action. After this operation he was lulled to sleep by a regular shampooing. It appears that, despite of all these practices, the stomachs of the ancients were sometimes so pertinaciously retentive, that more powerful means to relieve them were adopted; and when the longest feather that could be plucked from a goose proved unavailing, gloves dipped in the oil of cyprus were put on, and the fingers thus inuncted replaced the feathers. When this failed, the obstinate sufferer was made to swallow a quart or two of honey and hot water, in which rue had been infused; and when this proved ineffectual, he was slung in a hammock to produce the sensation of sea-sickness. In some cases it appears that, despite this practice, the patient thought proper to faint. On such occasions little wedges of wood were driven between his obstinate and rebellious teeth clenched against medicine, so as to allow the introduction of the goose-quill, while cephalic snuff of the precious hellebore and euphorbia was blown up his nostrils to produce sneezing. The last trial to relieve him was tossing the ill-fated wight in a blanket. After this experiment the patient was left to nature or to his friends, if he would not recover. These friends immediately proceeded to give him punches in the stomach, roll him about the floor, and endeavour to restore him to his senses by driving him out of them by every possible noise that could frighten him, if his frightful condition was at all susceptible of any thing left in the arsenal of medicinal ingenuity.[45]Small doses of hellebore seem to have been taken not only with impunity, but were supposed to assist the mental faculties. According to Valerius Maximus and Aulus Gellius, orators were in the practice of using this stimulus before their disputations. Such, it is said, was the habit of Carneades, whose doctrines might well have been applied to this very day to many theories, since he denied that any thing in the world could be perceived or understood.

Hellebore is to this day an ingredient in many of the fashionable pills vended by successful quacks. This introduction, at any rate, shows that their compounders have candour enough to think (although they may not acknowledge it) that the intellectual faculties of the purchasers of their nostrums do stand in need of some medicinal aid.