Placebo - 'to please'

Early Christian communities of monks would begin a particular prayer session after a member had died with a reading of the ninth verse of Psalm 116 which in Latin is "Placebo Domino n Rione viroum", roughly translated this means 'I shall be pleasing the Lord in the land of the living'. So placebo in this context was usually translated as 'I shall please'.

In medieval English, the word took on the meaning of a flatterer, sycophant or parasite - someone out to please others with artifice rather than substance.

Then in the early nineteenth century, this meaning of the word started to be used by physicians. A medical dictionary published in 1811 defined a placebo as

"an epithet given to any medicine adapted more to please than benefit the patient".

[From reading Daniel Moerman's "Meaning, Medicine and the 'Placebo Effect'"]