Cure or solace. The expression comes from the Book of Jeremiah (8:22): “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?” The King James version translator took as “balm” the Hebrew word sori, which probably meant the resin of the mastic tree; John Wycliffe translated it as “gumme” and Miles Coverdale as “triacle” (treacle). By the nineteenth century, the term was used figuratively for consolation in a time of trouble, by Edgar Allan Poe (in “The Raven”), Charlotte Brontë, and others.