Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Roméo et Juliette

Sleeping Potions in Opera

In the world of opera the librettists have taken advantage of every possible dramatic ploy in order to devise the most theatrically thrilling (and sometimes inane) story plots that will in turn be heightened by the lyric art of music. It is no wonder that sleeping potions have found their way into the opera house in a variety of guises.

In La Gioconda Laura is given a sleeping potion that will give her the appearance of death; when she wakes she will be able to escape with Enzo. In Roméo et Juliette Friar Laurence gives Juliette a sleeping potion to accomplish the same, in order that she may escape with Roméo. In spite of the anecdotal "bubble, bubble, toil and trouble" school of pharmacology there are sources that provide information on what those "potions" might have been comprised.

A Greek surgeon in Nero's army in the first century AD, Dioscorides, described the effects of mandrake (potato family, contains belladonna alkaloids = parasympatholytic drugs), henbane (hyoscyamus, a mild narcotic, also from the belladonna family), opium, and also alcohol on inducing sleep. His famous work, De materia Medica, was the source of almost all botanical knowledge for some 1500 years to follow. Dioscorides recommended that mandrake be used for surgical anesthesia. Although tradition has credited Oliver Wended Holmes with the actual term "anesthesia." Dioscorides actually used it first. The world was revived by Quistorp in the nineteenth century, and later used by John Eliotson and others in association with Mesmerism in the nineteenth century, before O. W. Holmes finally applied it definitively to the famous use of ether by the dentist Morton in 1846 (in the Massachusetts General "etherdome").

One reason why there may be few references to anesthesia in the Middle Ages is that pain was considered in some religious teachings to be a "noble" state. (Theological doctrine held that pain serves God's purpose and therefore was not to be alleviated.) However, European surgeons during the Middle Ages did use mandrake, cannabis indica, henbane, opium, and wine, much as described 1000 years earlier.

Theodoric, a pioneer surgeon from the school of Bologna in Italy, described (13th century) what was used in anesthesia as "a soporific sponge."

"Take of opium, of the juice of the unripe mulberry, of hyoscyamus, of the juice of hemlock, of the juice of the leaves of the mandragora, of the juice of the wood ivy, of the seeds of dock which has large round apples and the water-hemlock, each an ounce. Mix all these in a brazen vessel and then place in it a new sponge; let the whole boil as long as the sun lasts on a dog-day until the sponge consumes it all. Place this sponge in hot water for an hour and let it be applied to the nostrils of him who is to be operated on until he has fallen asleep and so let the surgery be performed."
(Soporific sponges were in widespread use until the 17th century.)

A variation of the "Theodoric sponge" contained cannabis indica (hemp grown in India) swallowed as a wine solution, smoked, or burned in bonfires. (The active principal would be known today as marijuana.)

Another interesting account of anesthesia is found in early Hindu writings. In AD 927, two surgeons operated on the King of Dhasi. They induced anesthesia with a drug named "samohine," trephined the skull, removed a tumor, and then added as "a reversal agent" to arouse the patient, an onion compounded with vinegar poured into the mouth.

We can all be thankful for the advances of medicine that allow for much more comfortable and safe techniques for the dulling of the senses, for either sleep or anesthesia. However, for perhaps the preferred method we should again turn to the world of opera, when Wotan puts his beloved daughter Brünnhilde to sleep - with a kiss.

John Wilber, M.D.

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