The word placebo started out as a translation mistake. When Jerome translated the Bible from Greek into Latin, he made a mistake in Psalm 116, line 9 (modern edition), writing Placebo Domino, “I shall please the Lord,” instead of Ambulabo coram Domino, “I shall walk before the Lord.”
And hence, from the 13th century, the word placebo gave its name to the Office of the Dead church service, where the verse was chanted. To later people mocking the chanters for the falsely claimed connection to the deceased, aimed at getting a share of the funeral meal or money, calling them singers of placebo.
The word was firstly recorded in English – in its meaning of ‘vespers in the Office for the Dead’ – in Ancrene Wisse, a 13th century anonymous monastic manual.
In the following centuries, the word developed the general meaning of ‘someone who tries to please by any means possible, a servile flatterer.’
For example, Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, uses Placebo as the name of the sycophantic brother of the protagonist.
During the 16th century, placebo relics were given to people showing signs of diabolical possessions. Obviously, demons were not skilful enough to make the difference between real and false relics, as most possessed patients reacted well to the deceiving treatment.
Two centuries later, the word placebo entered the medical jargon. And the practice of prescribing placebo drugs for the satisfaction of the patient’s mind, and not with the view of producing any direct therapeutic effect, became common.
Physicians of the time often administered simple and powerless medicines (bread pills, drops of coloured water, powders of hickory ashes, milk sugar) to their hypochondriacal and obstinate patients.
The first recorded use in English, in George Motherby’s A new medical dictionary: or, general repository of physic, 1785, comes to prove how common the practice was: “Placebo, a common place method or medicine.”
The same year saw the first documented clinical use of intentionally administered placebo drugs.
In 1807 Thomas Jefferson, recording what he called the pious fraud, observed that one of the most successful physicians assured him that he used more placebo drugs, than of all other medicines put together.
The first to document the placebo effect in modern times, was Graves in a published paper in The Lancet in 1920. Though the term was recorded in use nearly 2 decades earlier, in Sanitarian: “Formic acid is not known to have any value as a virus antidote, and there may have been a mere placebo effect ..witnessed.”
In the 70s, randomised controlled drugs trials where participants are allocated to a group receiving the treatment and to a control group receiving a placebo drug, became a strong tool for the approval and sales of newly developed drugs.
The explanations why a placebo, a substance with no known medical effects, can have both physical and psychological effects, are mainly linked to the power of belief and expectations and the release of endorphins, which work as painkillers, as a result of an expected positive effect.
Though the results can also be negative, as some patients might report having headaches, nausea or dizziness in response to a placebo, known as nocebo effect.
