ABSTRACT
The genus Narcissus has yielded several useful or potentially useful compounds, although just one of them, galanthamine, has been investigated in any great detail. As with most modern phytopharmaceuticals, identification, purification and investigation of the active principles have only been accomplished after many years, perhaps centuries, of folk medicine use as whole plant material or crude extracts. For the earliest account of a clinical use of galanthamine one has to go back to ancient Greek times. Homer’s Odyssey has it that the attempts of Circe to poison Odysseus were foiled when Hermes gave Odysseus an antidotal root drawn from the earth, with a black root and milk-like flower, which was difficult for mortals to dig up and which the gods called ‘moly’. On the basis of descriptions of their symptoms (memory loss, hallucinations and delusions that they had been turned into pigs) it has been suggested that the drug which Circe had used to poison Odysseus’ men was a powerful, centrally acting, anticholinergic drug called stramonium, derived from the common plant Datura stramonium. The story is told much more eloquently by Plaitakis and Duvoisin (1983) who postulate that the antidote was derived from the common snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, which contains the anticholinesterase, galanthamine. This is based on the description of the antidote or ‘moly’ given by Homer and by later Greek texts and recognition that both plants (Datura and Galanthus) would have been a resource native to the area. The authors state that if all this were true, then it represents the oldest recorded use of an anticholinesterase to reverse anticholinergic intoxication.
