The three-thousand-year journey of colchicine

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In the summer of 1760, a French military officer named Nicolas Husson was brewing his Eau Médicinale, a medicinal draught that would eventually find its way across the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia doorstep. Franklin, tormented by gout and desperate for relief, had heard whispers of this mysterious European remedy. He could not have known that he was importing one of humanity’s oldest medicines, recorded as a poison roughly around 1500 BC, and that it would, more than two centuries after Franklin’s death, prevent heart attacks in American patients.

Colchicine is extracted from the autumn crocus, a purple flower native to Europe, and its story spans three millennia of medical history. Today, it stands as one of the few substances that can claim both ancient pedigree and modern FDA approval, having navigated the treacherous waters of contemporary pharmaceutical regulation to emerge as a treatment for gout, rare genetic diseases, and cardiovascular conditions.

The origin story

The earliest surviving reference to colchinine appears in the late fourth century BC, when botanist Theophrastus wrote of a deadly plant called ephemeron, meaning ‘one-day killer’. By the first century AD, Dioscorides had given it the name that stuck: kolchikon (‘plant from Colchis’) and later called colchicum, warning it ‘kills by choking, similar to mushrooms’. For the next 1,500 years, Western medicine treated colchicum strictly as poison. Medieval herbalists warned against its use; renaissance physician John Gerard declared its roots ‘very hurtfull to the stomacke’.

This reputation began to shift in the late eighteenth century, when French army officer Nicolas Husson created a wildly popular secret gout remedy called Eau Médicinale. Selling for the equivalent of 22 shillings per tiny bottle, then a fortune, the mysterious potion baffled Europe’s chemists, who guessed its active ingredient might be everything from white hellebore to digitalis to tobacco.

In 1814, Englishman John Want finally solved the puzzle through a combination of scholarly research, chemical analysis, and possibly industrial espionage, reportedly obtaining information through a nursemaid who had previously worked for Husson. Want identified colchicum as the secret ingredient and published his findings in medical journals, sparking a revolution in gout treatment. The plant physicians had avoided for nearly two millennia had ...