Medicinal Properties

"Bread, too," wrote Pliny the Elder, "which forms our ordinary nutriment, possesses medicinal properties almost without number."

A modern Italian tested one of the remedies he described. She soaked bread in wine, added myrtle, and applied it to a pustule on her head. "It doesn't work," she said. "Why doesn't it work?"

She considered the problem.

"Of course. Bread must have changed over hundreds of years. It has lost its medicinal properties."

So she researched ancient bread and sold it as a medicine. It was so good that it cured everything. Rich international drug companies sent assassins after her. They shot her, but she applied bread to the wound and it healed; they poisoned her with the undetectable extracts of plants but she swallowed some bread and was cured.

At that the assassins gave up and she employed them as bakers. They changed their black shirts for white aprons and sang as they worked.



For the full translation of the passage from Pliny, go here.