Talk:Venice treacle

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"d'Amsterdammer Apotheek 1686"

I will appreciate if anyone could provide some introductory information about this book since it is used as the only one reference for the ingredients section. I searched google and it appears nothing much is available, and those few exist are in Dutch. --BorgQueen 18:52, 28 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I question this book's authenticity also. Further, the article states as a reference:

"This article incorporates content from the 1728 Cyclopaedia, a publication in the public domain."

I can find no evidence that the formula for theriac in the article came from this source. –Mattisse (Talk) 23:01, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is never stated that the ingredients section originates from that source - that sentence belongs to the first section, before the ingredient list was added to the article "Venice treacle".

Originally, "Theriaca Andromachi" was created as a separate article by user Marscha on 8 January 2006, which included the ingredient list with latin names (english names and interwiki links were added later). In August 2006, the ingredient list was first moved to "Venice treacle" and in February 2007 the two articles were instead merged. (This is maybe most easily revealed from the contribution list for the IP adress 84.101.171.209 involved in the tying together of the two articles).

Unfortunately, user Marscha left us with no other reference than "d'Amsterdammer Apotheek 1686", giving the impression that this user did the translation "from the old Latin names into the Latin names now used where possible" him-/herself - which I doubt. I do not doubt the mentioned book's authenticity, nor its listing of these ingredients, but I think the user had access to a secondary source which was not mentioned.

Also unfortunately, this user stopped making Wikipedia contributions after the day of creation, making it less probable that we will ever obtain a trustworthy source for the information. But the Amsterdam pharmacopé book definitely exists, as also indicated by the slightly more detailed reference added by Sjoerd, and I think it is plausible that it contained the ingredient list. Yet, we cannot be sure enough, and neither do we know who made the latin-to-latin "translations" of the original names. So, I suggest we leave the information, as it might be valuable, but with yet another fact tag for the subsequent comment.

It is also interesting to note that the german and french Wikipedia give formulations of theriac ingredients with more satisfactory sources. Beryllium-9 (talk) 00:10, 28 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it is an utter mess and I'd love to be able to do better. What I've done today, though, is to summon my Be-Bravery, attempt to improve the accuracy of some of the ingredient identifiers, and often reassign them to different categories, most of which changes I hope give something more plausible than what was there before. I think we're stuck, though, between the Scylla of an unobtainable source and the Charybdis of having to do some (or lots of!) OR to make sense of what's there and not simply to present it as an indigestible mass.

I readily acknowledge that some of my category assignments are debatable (the ref to Papaver somniferum as seed could have been correct, but isn't it more likely to have been added as opium? and similarly with others). If people think that the whole article is too speculative to be encyclopaedic, I'm tempted to agree; if anyone disagrees with any of my revisions, I'm not so attached to them that I'd blink at a revert (though a discussion of any points might be useful). The ball's back in your court, people; I've done what I could. Kay Dekker (talk) 01:01, 29 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]