Andrés Laguna's Castilian Dioscorides (Antwerp, 1555) and the witch-ointment he tested on a living patient

In 1555 the Segovian physician Andrés Laguna printed at Antwerp the first Castilian translation of Dioscorides, with his own commentary and plant figures. In the nightshade annotation he set down something rarer: as city physician of Metz he had obtained the green flying-ointment found in an accused couple's hut, had it rubbed over a sleepless woman, and revived her from a long narcotic sleep of vivid pleasures — concluding the witches' Sabbath was a drug-dream, not a flight.