An obsolete or archaic medicinal substance or compound, possibly herbal or mineral-based, whose exact composition is now unknown.
Possibly from Old French or Medieval Latin pharmaceutical naming conventions, combining elements to describe a remedy. The term appears in old apothecary texts but meaning is lost.
Medieval medicine had remedies with wildly complicated names—'alycompaine' sounds like it should cure something, but historians of medicine can't figure out what it actually was or if it ever worked!
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