How Witches' Brews Helped Bring Modern Drugs to Market
By Helen Thompson
October 31, 2014
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble
There’s no more iconic image of witchcraft that that conjured by Shakespeare in the opening act of Macbeth. Every Halloween we revisit the fictional trope of witches stirring cauldrons full of colorful ingredients: venomous toads, animal tongues, a dead man’s toes. While the Bard tapped into a real fear of witchcraft and the occult in Elizabethan society, it’s unlikely that most people prosecuted as witches during Shakespeare’s time and earlier in the Middle Ages brewed potions for truly nefarious purposes. Instead, most potions probably contained intoxicants or folk remedies.
Perhaps the most striking example of witchcraft’s influence on medicine comes from psychotropic plant compounds associated with “flying ointments,” salves reportedly created as magical aids during the height of the European witch-hunting craze in the 1500s and 1600s. In 1545, Spanish physician Anres Laguna provided an account of one such ointment found at the residence of an elderly couple suspected of witchcraft:
“… a jar half-filled with a certain green unguent … with which they were anointing themselves … was composed of herbs … which are hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake.”
Some of these plants prove poisonous at high doses, but some also contain a tropane alkaloid called hyoscine. Native Americans used a hyoscine-rich plant called thorn apple (Datura stramonium) as a local anesthetic, but also in religious rituals, because at higher doses hyoscine can cause delirium and hallucinations. In medieval Europe, hyoscine’s association with magic may explain the link between witches and broomsticks.
Supposedly witches applied the salve to their skin—either under the arms or (for the daring) on the genitalia. Absorbing the chemicals through sweat ducts avoids the stomach and risk of poisoning. Hallucination and the altered mental state induced by hyoscine may have given medieval witches the illusion of flight. It’s unclear how widespread these flying ointments were, though, and some question the veracity of such claims, since prosecutors may have coerced the confessions. But a 1324 inquisitor’s account of a suspected witch, Lady Alice Kyteler, does paint an interesting image of the ointment in action:
“In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of oynment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.”
Today hyoscine—also called scopolamine in the U.S.—is a common treatment for motion sickness, as low doses can relieve nausea and stomach cramps.
continued http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-witches-brews-helped-bring-modern-drugs-market-r
By Helen Thompson
October 31, 2014
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble
There’s no more iconic image of witchcraft that that conjured by Shakespeare in the opening act of Macbeth. Every Halloween we revisit the fictional trope of witches stirring cauldrons full of colorful ingredients: venomous toads, animal tongues, a dead man’s toes. While the Bard tapped into a real fear of witchcraft and the occult in Elizabethan society, it’s unlikely that most people prosecuted as witches during Shakespeare’s time and earlier in the Middle Ages brewed potions for truly nefarious purposes. Instead, most potions probably contained intoxicants or folk remedies.
Perhaps the most striking example of witchcraft’s influence on medicine comes from psychotropic plant compounds associated with “flying ointments,” salves reportedly created as magical aids during the height of the European witch-hunting craze in the 1500s and 1600s. In 1545, Spanish physician Anres Laguna provided an account of one such ointment found at the residence of an elderly couple suspected of witchcraft:
“… a jar half-filled with a certain green unguent … with which they were anointing themselves … was composed of herbs … which are hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake.”
Some of these plants prove poisonous at high doses, but some also contain a tropane alkaloid called hyoscine. Native Americans used a hyoscine-rich plant called thorn apple (Datura stramonium) as a local anesthetic, but also in religious rituals, because at higher doses hyoscine can cause delirium and hallucinations. In medieval Europe, hyoscine’s association with magic may explain the link between witches and broomsticks.
Supposedly witches applied the salve to their skin—either under the arms or (for the daring) on the genitalia. Absorbing the chemicals through sweat ducts avoids the stomach and risk of poisoning. Hallucination and the altered mental state induced by hyoscine may have given medieval witches the illusion of flight. It’s unclear how widespread these flying ointments were, though, and some question the veracity of such claims, since prosecutors may have coerced the confessions. But a 1324 inquisitor’s account of a suspected witch, Lady Alice Kyteler, does paint an interesting image of the ointment in action:
“In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of oynment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.”
Today hyoscine—also called scopolamine in the U.S.—is a common treatment for motion sickness, as low doses can relieve nausea and stomach cramps.
continued http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-witches-brews-helped-bring-modern-drugs-market-r
