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.
Why this wins its question: In English, the "witches' flying ointment" is usually a folklore footnote, and when a name is attached it is often garbled; the standard herbal history gives the Castilian Dioscorides only a line. This object quotes the 1555 first edition directly: Laguna's own statement of why Spanish lacked a Dioscorides and how he built one by comparing living simples against the text, and then his first-person account of the Metz ointment — its four cold, soporific herbs, the hangman's sleepless wife anointed head to foot, the thirty-six-hour sleep of "todos los plazeres y deleytes del mundo", the revival, and the inference that the Sabbath is a drug-dream. It puts the achievement and its limits side by side: an early case of testing a claim by reproducing its cause, told by one man about himself with no second witness and no control, on a tortured or desperate subject, and carefully kept within the "sano parecer" of the Church of Rome so that it could be printed at all.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The title page names the whole undertaking: "PEDACIO DIOSCORIDES ANAZARBEO, ACERCA DE LA MATERIA MEDICINAL, Y DE LOS VENENOS MORTIFEROS, Traduzido de lengua Griega, en la vulgar Castellana, & illustrado con claras y substantiales Annotationes, y con las figuras de innumeras plantas exquisitas y raras, por el Doctor Andres de Laguna, Medico de Iulio III. Pont. Max." It was printed "EN ANVERS, En casa de Iuan Latio. Anno, M.D.LV." — Antwerp, at the press of Juan Latio, 1555 — "Cum Gratia & Priuilegio Imperiali", and dedicated to Philip, heir of Charles V. Laguna was thus at once translator, commentator and provider of the figures.
Laguna states his motive in the prologue as a want he set out to repair: Dioscorides, he writes, had been communicated "à todas las otras lenguas ... saluo à la nuestra Española", which "ò por nuestro descuydo, ò por alguna siniestra constellation, ha sido siempre la menos cultiuada de todas, con ser ella la mas capaz, ciuil, y fecunda de las vulgares". He resolved therefore "de hazerle de Griego Español, y d'illustrarle con Cómentarios, y con las figuras de todas las yeruas ... en beneficio immortal de toda la patria". The book is presented as an act of linguistic and scientific catching-up, not of mere scholarship.
He also records the cost of assembling it, and this is where the claim to novelty rests. He passes over "quantos y quan trabajosos viajes hize" and how "sin duelo gastè la mayor parte de mi caudal y substantia, en hazerme traher de Grecia, d'Egypto, y de Berberia, muchos simples exquisitos y raros, para conferirlos con sus historias" — that is, comparing the living plant against the ancient text rather than trusting the text alone. The dedicatory poem, put in the mouth of Dioscorides himself, frames the transfer as the Greek author coming to rest "Al sossegado Reyno de Castilla ... Debaxo de la sombra y dulce amparo, Del gran PHILIPPO".
The book's lasting fame in the history of science is an annotation to the nightshade (Solano) in book IV, where Laguna, arguing that the ravings attributed to the herb belong to a dream, offers his own case. As salaried physician of the city of Metz he had visited Duke Francisco de Lorena, ill at Nancy in 1545, when a village came to demand justice against an old couple held in a hermitage, "por quanto (segun la publica boz y fama) eran bruxos notorios". Put to torture, the pair confessed; and among the things found in their hut "fue una olla medio llena de un cierto unguento verde, como el del Populeon: con el qual se untauan".
Laguna's account is precise about the ointment and about what he did with it. Its heavy odour "mostraua ser compuesto de yeruas en ultimo grado frias y soporiferas: quales son la Cicuta, el Solano, el Veleño, y la Mádragora" — hemlock, nightshade, henbane and mandrake. "Por medio del alguazil, que me era amigo, procurè de hauer un buen bote" of it, and "en la ciudad de Mets hize untar de pies à cabeça la muger del Verdugo, que de celos de su marido hauia totalmente perdido el sueño, y bueltose quasi medio phrenetica". The subject was chosen as an apt one, on whom "se podian hazer semejantes prueuas" — an explicit trial.
The result, on his telling, was a deep narcotic sleep, not a flight. "La qual subito en siendo untada, con los ojos abiertos como conejo ... se adurmio de un tan profundo sueño, que jamas pensè despertarla"; only after thirty-six hours of strong ligatures and frictions of the extremities, perfusions of oil of costus and euphorbium, fumigations and finally cupping did he restore her "en su juyzio y acuerdo". Her first words on waking were a reproach — "Porque en mal punto me despertastes, que estaua rodeada de todos los plazeres y deleytes del mundo?" — and she told her husband, smiling, that she had taken a younger and handsomer lover. Some vain opinions, Laguna adds, stayed lodged in her head.
From the single case he draws a general conclusion: "Dedonde podemos conjecturar, que todo quanto dizen y hazen las desuenturadas bruxas, es sueño, causado de beurages y unctiones muy frias", cold enough to corrupt the memory and fantasy so that the wretched women "aun firmissimamente creen, hauer hecho despiertas, todo quanto soñaron durmiendo". The flying, the pacts, the carnal knowledge of the Demon they confessed under torture are, on this reading, effects of the drug — though he grants the accused were scandalous and deserved exemplary punishment for making pacts with the Devil.
The object states plainly what the passage is not. It is one physician's report of one case, told by Laguna about himself years afterward, with no corroborating witness; the woman was a tortured or vulnerable subject and the "trial" had no control and no consent as later ages would understand the words. Its interest is that a Renaissance physician met a demonological claim by reproducing its supposed cause and reasoning from the effect, rather than by citing authority — but it is a naturalistic argument dressed as an anecdote, not an experiment in the modern sense.
Laguna does not push the naturalism past the theology of his church. He closes the passage by referring the whole question "al sano parecer de la Sancta iglesia de Roma", noting that the greater part of what the witches do "es deuaneo" and that they never leave the place where they fall asleep, "y esta es la opinion de la mayor parte de los Theologos, aprouada tambié con decretos de algunos sanctos Concilios": the Demon works only "por medio de naturales causas", teaching the vain women the virtue of such ointments. His scepticism about the flight is thus offered as, and bounded by, orthodox opinion — which is part of why it could be printed with an imperial privilege and a papal physician's name on the title.
The nineteenth-century study of Laguna by Joaquín Olmedilla y Puig (1887) confirms the book's standing and its lineage. Olmedilla devotes a whole part of his biography to the Dioscorides "para poder apreciar con exactitud hasta dónde llegaban los conocimientos científicos de Laguna y juzgar con acierto el estado de las ciencias naturales en España en la décimasexta centuria", calling it "una enciclopedia de medicamentos"; and he records that Dioscorides had been printed before Laguna — by Jean Ruel in 1518, and in an Alcalá edition annotated by Antonio de Nebrija with a Lexicon giving the Castilian equivalents of the Greek and Latin plant-names. Laguna's achievement was the full vernacular translation with commentary and figures, not the first printing of the Greek text.