In Antiquity, the yew was not used for medicinal purposes because it was so toxic. However there was one exception to this – it was used for healing snake bites.
The Ancient Greeks believed that if you had one poison in your system already (snake bite) you had nothing in your body to fight it. By introducing an additional poison (yew) they believed that the two poisons would fight each other and eventually wipe each other out.
I don’t believe there could have been any volunteers to try this out! Herakles dealt with snakes differently. He was said to have strangled two of them when he was a baby. Here is pottery fragment of this scene:
There were other ways to make use of yew poison. Pliny the Elder reported that in Spain, which had been conquered by the Romans in the second century BC, souvenir flasks carved from yew wood were sold to Roman tourists. Many of these died after drinking from them…
tylluanpenry
What an interesting post! I particularly liked the bit about the conquered Spanish making flasks of yew wood to presumably get their own back on the ROmans! Talk about a poisoned chalice!