There was a time when your local apothecary was a delightful little establishment where you could purchase something to cure your headache, settle your stomach, soothe your nerves, or accidentally shuffle off this mortal coil.
Sometimes, all four came from the same shelf.
Before pharmacies there were apothecaries. Wonderful, mysterious little shops filled with glass bottles, dried roots, strange powders, and questionable medical advice that was passed down for centuries.
And tucked among the chamomile, lavender, and peppermint were some considerably less forgiving botanicals.
Let me introduce you to a few of my new favorites.
Belladonna: The Beautiful Woman With Terrible Intentions
Atropa belladonna, better known as deadly nightshade, is a rather charming plant with purple-brown flowers and shiny black berries that look like they have absolutely no intention of murdering anybody. This is misleading.
It was also called devil’s cherries, because the old story goes that the devil tends this plant personally. He only leaves it once a year on Walpurgis Night to party with the witches (Walpurgis Night is April 30th, Halloween’s spring twin, and trust me, we will be revisiting it).
Its common name, belladonna, means "beautiful woman" in Italian. Renaissance women supposedly dripped Belladonna into their eyes to make their pupils big, dark, and luminous. Very effective except for the whole “can’t see” thing. Which is also probably why they were ok with marrying old dudes. Anyway…fast forward a few hundred years, and your eye doctor is using drugs from the same family to dilate your pupils. SCIENCE!
Belladonna has a couple more noteworthy triumphs under her belt. Belladonna’s main compound, atropine, is one of the most important emergency drugs we have. When a heart starts beating dangerously slow, atropine is one of the first things emergency doctors reach for. It’s also the antidote for nerve agents and certain pesticide poisonings. The poison that cures poison.
I love that.
Foxglove: The Heartbreaker
If belladonna is the beautiful woman with questionable intentions, foxglove is the elegant lady who looks perfectly respectable at Sunday tea but has already poisoned three husbands.
Allegedly.
The name may actually come from “folk’s glove,” the folk being fairies. The story is that fairies handed the blossoms out to foxes to wear on their paws, so they could sneak into henhouses without a sound. Those little spots inside the flowers? Fairy fingerprints.
I am choosing to believe every word of this.
Fairies aside, foxglove is no joke. A few leaves can stop your heart. Paradoxically, the eighteenth century physician, William Withering, began systematically investigating its effects on a condition called dropsy (swelling often caused by heart failure). His findings, published in 1785, helped establish the medicinal importance of digitalis.
I should mention that the honorable Dr. Withering first heard about the benefits of foxglove from a herbalist from Shropshire who was using it in a secret family remedy that successfully treated dropsy. Despite her success as a healer, he only mentions her one time in his research, as “an old woman." He never bothered to write down her name.
Typical.
Still, her efforts outlived both Dr. Withering and his B-readers, as Foxglove’s compound, digoxin, is still used for treating heart conditions today.
Henbane: Questionable Transportation or Just a Fun Trip?
Henbane is the star ingredient in the witch’s flying ointment. For those of you not in the know, flying ointment was a salve, basically a balm, made by cooking poisonous plants from the nightshade family into animal fat. Henbane was the headliner, usually with a supporting cast of belladonna, mandrake, and sometimes datura. All of them are loaded with compounds that cause wild hallucinations, the sensation of flying or falling, and then a deep, heavy sleep. Witches supposedly rubbed it on their skin before the sabbath, woke up hours later, and swore they’d been soaring over the countryside all night.
So yeah, no actual flying…although…there’s a popular theory about how this ointment is connected to witches riding broomsticks. It is not suitable for a family-friendly blog. If you really need to know, ask me in the comments, and I will tell you...with a completely straight face.
And for those of you who are still questioning henbane’s place in the witchy poison shelf… I have some tea for you.
Meet Andrés Laguna, a 16th-century Spanish physician who, around 1545, got his hands on a jar of mysterious green ointment confiscated from a couple accused of witchcraft. He decided to test it on a woman suffering from terrible insomnia and jealousy. Oh, and she happened to be the local executioner's wife.
He applied the ointment, and she fell into a deep sleep. For 36 HOURS. When he finally managed to wake her, she was FURIOUS. Why? Because she'd been having the time of her life.
According to Laguna's account, she complained about being pulled away from extraordinary pleasures and told her husband she'd found herself a younger, more handsome lover.
HER HUSBAND. THE EXECUTIONER.
I don't know what happened at breakfast the next morning, but I would have paid good money to be a fly on that wall.
So, what about today? Henbane contains scopolamine, a compound that can be absorbed through the skin. Purified and carefully dosed scopolamine is the same medication used in those little motion-sickness patches people stick behind their ears on cruise ships. Same botanical chemistry, same general delivery method, considerably better quality control.
It just keeps your lunch down now instead of showing a girl a good time.
Wolfsbane: EWWW, dog drool!
Wolfsbane, also called monkshood or aconite, is the one that never achieved modern reformation. But every shelf needs one bottle that stayed bad, right? It has beautiful violet-blue flowers shaped like tiny, hooded figures.
Adorable.
Wolfsbane has a long and spectacularly unpleasant history involving poison and assassinations. The plant's toxic compounds can interfere with normal nerve and heart function, and severe poisoning can be fatal. Historically, aconite was associated with poisoned weapons. In European folklore, wolfsbane became tangled up with stories of wolves, witches, and eventually werewolves.
According to Greek mythology, aconite sprang from the poisonous saliva of Cerberus, the three-headed hound guarding the underworld. Which raises a few questions. For instance, why was anyone collecting plants growing in hellhound drool? And more importantly, who decided to bring them home? I can practically hear the conversation.
"Honey, what's that growing in the garden?"
"Oh, just something I found where the three-headed death dog was foaming at the mouth."
"Lovely. Shall I put the kettle on?"
Yew: The Graveyard Tree
Nearly every part of this baddie is poisonous. So poisonous, in fact, that the word “toxic” may trace back to it. Something to do with nefarious ancient Greeks and their dastardly poison-tipped arrows, blah blah blah. Anyhoo…the yew can live for thousands of years, and folklore says its roots grow down into the mouths of the dead. Cozy!
Today the yew gives us two of the most important chemotherapy drugs we have, paclitaxel and docetaxel. They are used to treat ovarian, lung, and prostate cancers, and they’re a mainstay in treating breast cancer.
The tree of death is out here saving lives. I get a little choked up about that one, not gonna lie. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I know a lot of women going through chemo for breast cancer right now. So to the graveyard tree...thank you. Keep doing your thing.
Willow: The gentle one
Gentle, or so I thought. Sacred to Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, and the traditional binding on a witch’s broom. Lovely. Then I found out that Circe (yes, the turns-men-into-pigs Circe) was said to have a willow grove where corpses hung from the branches like very upsetting wind chimes.
So. Not that gentle.
People have used willow bark for pain for thousands of years. It is the inspiration for todays aspirin. And of course there is salicylic acid, which is very likely sitting in your skincare right now, quietly minding your pores.
Ok, one last one, and it is my favorite. Technically it doesn’t belong here because it’s not a plant, and no old apothecary ever had it on a shelf. But it’s the best story I found, so it’s getting a spot anyway.
I give you….
Sausage poison!
It is actually called botulinum toxin, the deadliest toxin known to science. It is made by a bacteria that thrives in places without oxygen, like the inside of a badly made sausage, or later, badly home-canned food. Eat it, and the toxin paralyzes your muscles, including the ones you breathe with. That’s botulism, from the Latin botulus, meaning sausage.
It was first studied in the 1820s by a German doctor named Justinus Kerner, who was trying to figure out why people kept dying from bad sausages. Kerner theorized that tiny doses of said toxin might help treat conditions with overactive muscles and nerves.
Did I mention he was a poet? Because of course he was!
In the mid-1820s he moved a clairvoyant woman into his house and studied her visions and her conversations with spirits. He wrote a wildly popular book about her called, The Seeress of Prevorst. It is said that Kerner knew how to write a gripping narrative in powerful Romantic prose, and to get the most out of this book you need to read it in its original German.
Anyway. THIS GUY!
He spent his days up to his elbows in sausage poison (which, by the way, eventually gave us Botox) and his nights cavorting with the dead, a clairvoyant chick, AND his wife. Theirs was described as a relationship of "strong magnetic rapport." Hmmm...
Ok, but why does sausage poison belong on our shelf?
BECAUSE THE ALMOST “FATHER OF BOTOX” WAS A GHOST HUNTER!
I will never recover from this information.
A Final Word From the Poison Shelf
There's something wonderfully unsettling about poisonous plants. Nature has never been particularly interested in our definitions of good and evil. A flower can be exquisite and lethal. A poison can inspire a medicine. And apparently, a questionable sausage can inspire flawless skin.
So the next time you wander through a garden, appreciate the beautiful flowers, marvel at the science, and remember that some of nature's prettiest creations have very firm boundaries.
And for the record, none of these poisonous plants are in anything I make at Hagstone Hill. Please don't go foraging. I have enough to do without having to explain to the authorities why someone decided to make homemade flying ointment.
Stay curious. Stay alive.