Treacle began as a cure for snakebite. The Greek thēriakē meant an antidote to the bite of a wild beast, and for well over a thousand years theriac was the great compound medicine of Europe: dozens of ingredients pounded together, often including the flesh of the very viper it was meant to answer. It was taken in a sweet syrup, probably because nothing else would get it down. A sixteenth-century English Bible asks “Is there no treacle in Gilead?” where later translations say balm, and it meant the medicine. By the late 1600s the word had slid sideways onto the syrup. The cure went out of use. The spoonful that made it bearable kept the name.