Watching a TV review of the new off-Broadway musical comedy Placebo (in which “Louise is working on a placebo-controlled study of a new female arousal drug”*), I learned something interesting — not about myself or female arousal drugs, but about the word that gives the show its title. It didn’t always mean a therapy that provides a psychological benefit rather than a physiological effect or a dummy drug used in clinical trials. Apparently the word’s etymology is revealed and discussed in the early part of the new play, so we’ll do the same here (but without the arousal effect) …

Placebo came into the English language in the early 13th century, retaining the same spelling and definition of its Latin original, which meant I shall please (placebo is the future indicative of placere,“to please”). It had strong religious associations from the start, since it began the Middle Ages’ most common prayer traditionally sung or recited for the repose of the souls of the dead (what the Roman Catholic Church called the Office of the Dead); based on Psalm 116:9, the prayer circle began with the words “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum” – “I shall please the Lord in the land of the living”. The vesper itself became known as “the Placebo”, so much was the word linked with the rite commemorating the recently departed.

In France at this time it was customary for mourning families to give nourishment to the congregation immediately after the Office of the Dead ritual; this practice encouraged distant relatives and unrelated guests to attend the ceremony and simulate anguish and grief in the hope of being given food and drink, and so these funeral-crashers came to be recognized as archetypal pretenders. And because they would chant “placebo Domino in regione vivorum” together, they came to be known in French as either “placebo singers” or “singers of placebo”.

The pejorative term, at first associated quite specifically with someone who claimed a connection with the deceased for reasons of selfish greed, started to develop a more generalized meaning of flatterer or sycophant as time went on. In Hyamson’s Dictionary of English Phrases, published in 1922, the term “to sing placebo” is listed as meaning “to endeavour to carry favour”. This sense of sycophancy, which also reflected the word’s original Latin meaning of “I shall please”, can be seen clearly in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which he wrote in the late 14th century. In his Parson’s Tale, for example, he writes that “Flatterers are the devils chaplains, that sing ever ‘Placebo’”. And in The Merchant’s Tale, Placebo is the name of the sycophantic brother of Januarie.

The word was first used in a medical sense in the late 18th century to describe a “commonplace method or medicine”, and shortly afterwards as “any medicine adapted more to please than to benefit the patient”. It’s not really clear how the word came to describe this benign form of therapy — and later a non-active or “dummy” medicine used as a control in clinical drug trials. Since those receiving placebo therapies often tend to heal, a phenomenon known as the “placebo effect” was acknowledged and named from the turn of the 20th century.

* according to Theatermania