<p>Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term drug encompassed everything from herbs and spices--like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile--to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arse...

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term drug encompassed everything from herbs and spices--like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile--to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic...

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term drug encompassed everything from herbs and spices--like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile--to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic...

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term drug encompassed everything from herbs and spices--like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile--to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic...

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term drug encompassed everything from herbs and spices--like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile--to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic...

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term drug encompassed everything from herbs and spices--like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile--to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic...