Some boil the roots down in wine to a third, strain it and store it, and use one cup for the sleepless and those in great pain, and for patients about to be cut or cauterized whom they wish to make insensible.

Look at the word in the last line, anaisthēsia, "insensibility." When ether surgery began in 1846, Oliver Wendell Holmes proposed "anaesthesia" for the new state, borrowing it from Greek writers like this one. Ancient surgery meant cutting and burning: the knife, and the hot iron to stop the bleeding. A sleeping draught of mandrake wine was one of the few mercies available, and it was dangerous, because the line between a dose that stupefies and a dose that kills is narrow. The next sentence says so.