Ancient texts contain an extremely large and readily accessible body of information on traditional medicine describing a range of plants and other substances that have been recently investigated systematically. However, prospecting for drugs from herbals raises problems with philology and plant identification. We combined our expertise to re-examine Squill an ancient medicinal plant which deserves modern scientific investigation. For this, invaluable help has come from new computer technologies which allow access to the most important libraries of the History of Medicine.