Abracadabra!

Abracadabra! Many of us are familiar with this mystical incantation. Its arcane staccato and euphonious intonation has become deeply ingrained in our language through the word’s use as a magical catchphrase. The hex was, in my childhood experience, rather useless when it came to opening locked cabinets and provoking instantaneous transformations; nothing was conjured and very little materialized except for my own disappointment. But millennia past, this word was held in reverence, and it was used for a whole other purpose altogether. Abracadabra was not a silly-sounding piece of magician’s gibberish, but the “most famous of the ancient charms or talismans employed in medicine” and a powerful invocation against a very specific and very dangerous curse: malaria. Abracadabra’s origins lay in the annals of classical history and with the work of a Roman physician, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus. Serenus was a second- and third-century scholar and enjoyed great renown due to his position as tutor to Geta and Caracalla, sons of the emperor Septimius Severus, before their own ascendance. As did many of his contemporaries, Serenus published his teachings in the form of didactic poetry. In his only surviving work, De medicina praecepta, later known as the Liber Medicinalis, he describes a number of remedies and antidotes, but particularly notable is his explanation of the steps required to invoke a powerful cure to be used in the treatment of “semi-tertian fevers,” now recognized as malaria.