Natural Healers

In the Odyssey, written by Homer about 750 BC, the story is told of Hermes giving Odysseus a medicine from a plant that had “a black root but a milklike žower”, which the gods called “moly”. This medicine enabled him to resist the spells of the enchantress Circe, who had already bewitched half his crew. It is thought that the medicine may have come from a snowdrop. In the 1950s, a Bulgarian pharmacologist noticed that local villagers rubbed snowdrops on their foreheads to ease nerve pain in what seemed to be an old folk remedy.