Pharmakeia: The Oldest Word for “Poisoned, Not Infected”
The Greek word behind “pharmacy” meant remedy and poison at the same time. Revelation used it for the sorcery by which Babylon’s merchants deceived the nations
A 2018 experiment shows why the word may be more accurate than we thought: the drug we give for a “viral” fever can, at a toxic dose, make virus-sized particles that pass the injury on.
In 1793, as yellow fever swept through Philadelphia, America’s most famous physician treated his patients by bleeding them and dosing them with calomel, a mercury compound. Benjamin Rush’s methods “often were ineffective and actually brought many patients closer to their deathbeds” (Wikipedia).
Some patients were “bled to faintness,” losing as much as 1.5 liters of blood (Dialogue).
Two centuries later, a quote attributed to Rush circulates in the health-freedom movement. It warns that medicine will “organize into an undercover dictatorship.” I used it myself years ago.
The truth of the statement stands on its own, and I have went to great lengths to counter it myself. But he never wrote it. The University of Pennsylvania’s own guide to Rush mythology says plainly that it is bogus (Penn Libraries).
I start with that correction for two reasons. First, the argument that follows deserves better than an invented quote. Second, the real Rush is the better story: the man later imagined as a prophet of medical freedom was in fact the leading American practitioner of what came to be called “allopathy,” the medicine of opposing and suppressing.
The myth has covered up the practice. As I will argue, that is what pharmakeia means.
A word that means both
The Greek phármakon means drug, remedy, poison, and charm, all at once. It is very old. It is already found in Mycenaean Greek, and the leading etymological dictionary of Greek classes it as “Pre-Greek,” borrowed from a language older than Greek itself (Wiktionary; Hypotheses).
The classicist Jan Bremmer puts it simply: “both poison and drug were originally magical; so a pharmakon is a magical dose.” He notes that Greek dosis means “gift,” while German Gift means “poison” (Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies).
The word for “sorcery” grows from the same root. Pharmakeia has three layered meanings in the standard lexicon: (a) administering drugs, (b) poisoning, and (c) sorcery and magical arts, “often found in connection with idolatry” (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon).
Plato’s Laws separates two kinds of pharmakeia: one harms the body through substances, and the other works on the mind through spells (Zichi, Lund University).
Virus means poison
The vocabulary of infectious disease comes from the same place.
- Virus is Latin for “poison, poisonous liquid, sap of plants, slimy liquid, a potent juice.” It entered English in the late 14th century meaning “poisonous substance” (Etymonline). It is cognate with Sanskrit viṣá- and Greek iós, all meaning “poison, venom” (Dictionary.com).
- Virulent comes from Latin vīrulentus, “full of poison” (Etymonline).
- Poison comes from Latin pōtiō, “a drink,” especially “a medical drink,” and later “a (magic) potion” (Etymonline).
- Toxic comes from Greek tóxon, “bow.” The toxikon was the poison smeared on arrows (PMC).
So a virus is a poison, a poison is a medical drink, and a toxin is something shot into you from outside. The idea of the “invisible enemy” was in the words long before anyone had a microscope.
The oldest version of that idea is the opening of Western literature. In Book 1 of the Iliad, Apollo comes down and shoots plague into the Greek camp. The Greek word for his arrow, iós, is spelled the same as the word for poison (Liddell–Scott–Jones).
Apollo was also the god of the Thargelia, the Athenian festival at which a pharmakós, a human scapegoat, was “feasted, led round the town, beaten with green twigs, and driven out or killed with stones” (Britannica). Plague, arrow, poison, and scapegoat all belong to one god.
Technical note. The “arrow” and “poison” senses of iós are homonyms with different roots. The lexicon lists them as separate entries. This is a pun the Greeks would have heard, not a shared origin. Bremmer calls the link between pharmakós(scapegoat) and phármakon (drug) “probable, but problematic.”
When poison turned into a germ
“Virus” meant poison until very recently. In Edward Jenner’s 1798 smallpox report the word was “not precise” and meant infectious matter (PMC). His cowpox lymph, which he called variolae vaccinae, “smallpox of the cow” (PMC), was a poisonous fluid given deliberately as protection.
The first vaccine was a phármakon in the most literal sense.
The split came in 1898. The Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck called the filterable agent of tobacco mosaic disease a contagium vivum fluidum, a “contagious living fluid.” His conclusion “established a distinction between these agents and toxins” (EBSCO).
From then on, a virus was by definition not a poison. In 1937 Thomas Rivers argued that Koch’s postulates, the standard proof that a germ causes a disease, could not be applied unchanged to viruses (Journal of Bacteriology). The first electron micrographs of a virus were published in 1939 (PMC).
For about forty years the concept came before anyone saw the particle. The field kept the poison name.
The key experiment
This is the center of the argument, and the reason the old word is more than a metaphor.
In 2018, Scientific Reports published “Exogenous exosomes from mice with acetaminophen-induced liver injury promote toxicity in the recipient hepatocytes and mice” (Scientific Reports). Here is what the researchers did:
- They gave mice a toxic dose of acetaminophen (Tylenol): 300 mg/kg.
- The injured livers released exosomes, tiny membrane-bound vesicles that cells use to send messages. The exosomes averaged about 92 nanometers across, the size range of many viruses. Mice given acetaminophen had roughly three times as many as controls.
- The researchers isolated these exosomes and gave them to healthy liver cells and to healthy mice that never received the drug.
- The recipients showed oxidative stress, the inflammatory signals TNF-α and IL-1β, activation of the cell’s self-destruct pathway (JNK, Bax, caspases 3 and 9), and “markedly elevated hepatocyte apoptosis,” meaning liver-cell death.
Exosomes from control mice (CON-EXO) and from acetaminophen-injured mice (APAP-EXO). (a) Electron micrographs, scale bar 50 nm. (b) Size distribution: average 87 nm versus 92 nm. (c) Exosome counts, about three times higher after acetaminophen (p = 0.0006). Figure 2 from “Exogenous exosomes from mice with acetaminophen-induced liver injury promote toxicity in the recipient hepatocytes and mice,” Scientific Reports(2018), CC BY 4.0.
A separate study found that circulating vesicle counts also rise after acetaminophen overdose “in mice and humans” (PMC). Another found that exosomes from ordinary human plasma, carrying the enzyme CYP2E1, made acetaminophen toxicity in recipient cells worse (Scientific Reports, 2019).
Now look at what acetaminophen is for. It is the standard treatment for the fever and aches of influenza-like illness. A recent expert consensus recommended it unanimously (International Journal of Clinical Practice).
Put the pieces together. A fever is diagnosed as “viral.” A phármakon is given. At a toxic dose, that remedy injures cells, and the injured cells release virus-sized particles that pass the injury to tissue the drug never touched.
If the patient gets worse, or the illness seems to spread through the body, the cause on record is “the virus.” A test that detects particles or genetic material was not designed to tell the difference.
This is the remedy and the poison in a single molecule, and a symptom-suppressing treatment producing a phenomenon that looks like the illness it was given for.
I first wrote about this study in Reframing Viral Mechanisms, and it remains the foundation of the Poisoned, Not Infected series.
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