Nightshades have a deadly reputation
but these plants, steeped in myth and folklore, have been used for
thousands of years for medicinal purposes. And they may have properties
that could keep us healthy today, writes Mary Colwell.
"J K
Rowling was extremely good at botany, and one of the plants she put into
Harry Potter was mandrake," says Sandy Knapp, head of the Plants
Division at the Natural History Museum in London.
In Harry Potter
and the Chamber of Secrets, Prof Sprout shows Harry and his classmates
how to repot young mandrakes, but not without everyone wearing earmuffs.
"The cry of the mandrake is fatal to anyone who hears it," says
Hermione, showing off her knowledge to the class. But the students are
dealing with young plants which are not quite so dangerous. Prof Sprout
points out that as they are "only seedlings, their cries won't kill yet…
but they will knock you out for several hours".
The pupils cover
their ears and Harry pulls a mandrake out of its pot. "Instead of roots,
a small, muddy and extremely ugly baby popped out… He had pale green
mottled skin, and was clearly bawling at the top of his lungs."
The
scene is based on a medieval myth - it was believed that when pulled
from the ground the root emitted a shrill cry that drove people mad and
killed them.
An illustration from De Materia Medica by the Greek physician Dioscorides, made in 1460
The
plant also features in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "What with
loathsome smells, And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, That
living mortals, hearing them, run mad."
Herbalists who wanted to
use mandrake were advised to plug their ears, tie the plant to a dog and
place some meat out of reach - then when the dog ran to the meat it
would pull the screaming root out of the soil. The dog would die, but
the herbalist would get the mandrake safely.
An illustration published in the Netherlands circa 1175
This practice was actually
recorded by the renowned Spanish Muslim herbalist Ibn al-Baitar in the
13th Century. Fortunately, he relates that when he tried it the dog was
unharmed.
The mandrake is steeped in folklore, myth and legend.
"One of the reasons I think they were called mandrakes is that often
the mandrake root will branch and it looks like it has little legs like
people," says Knapp. "In all the medieval herbals the mandrakes were
always drawn with heads, then the bodies would be the roots with the
legs crossed."
The plant grows in arid areas around the
Mediterranean and Middle East where it has been used as a hallucinogen,
painkiller, aphrodisiac and fertility drug for thousands of years. But
the dose has to be right.
"In essence, if you were to consume it
you would basically get hallucinations, dizziness and increased heart
rate, and you could get disturbed vision as a consequence of it, and
then disturbed cognition. If the dose is high enough it could kill you,"
says Prof Michael Heinrich from the School of Pharmacy at UCL.
Witches
were said to put it in potions which sent them flying around the world
on their broomsticks. An early reference to mandrake being used as a
fertility drug can be found in the Bible in the Book of Genesis (30:14)
where Rachel tells Leah she can spend the night with her husband in
exchange for mandrakes, which she hopes will help her to conceive.
But
the roots were also used for dastardly deeds by murderers and a
relative of mandrake, henbane, was used by Dr Crippen to kill his wife
in 1910.
Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen poisoned his wife and hid her body under the cellar floor
It is also said that
mandrake-infused wine was offered to those being crucified to hasten the
end. And later the root was believed to grow where the bodily fluids
of murderers dripped beneath the gallows. Few plants are the subject of
so many diverse stories.
The mandrake is just one of 2,500 species
belonging to the Solanaceae family, which also contains tomatoes,
potatoes, chillies, aubergines, peppers, tobacco, deadly nightshade and
henbane - they are commonly called the Nightshades.
They all contain powerful alkaloids that affect the human body.
But "it's like the two headed coin, there's the bad guys and the good guys," says Knapp.
"In
Europe we have things like mandrake and henbane and deadly nightshade,
so Solanaceae in Europe are baddies, they are not to be touched and not
to be eaten and not to be meddled with.
"The potatoes and
tomatoes from the New World don't have those poisonous compounds in
them, they have a different type of compound which was used at one time
as a basis for making birth control pills."
Today around 164 million tonnes of tomatoes and 376 million tonnes of potatoes are grown for food each year.
But
when tomatoes and potatoes first arrived in Europe from South America
in the early 1500s, they were treated with suspicion because they looked
so similar to the Nightshades. "The tomato was characterised in early
herbals as a strange type of mandrake, so people weren't that keen,"
says Knapp. As a result, tomatoes were grown as ornamental plants in
Northern Europe and North America until the 18th Century.
The flower of a potato plant
The potato was also viewed with
suspicion for a while. Eating a mandrake root was certainly not
recommended so why risk a potato? But when we did, its effect on Europe
was extraordinary. "You have a very important part of the English and
Northern European diet coming in about 1600 to 1700," says Andrew Smith,
writer and lecturer in food history at the New School University in New
York.
"And it's the major reason why in Northern Europe
populations doubled in a hundred years, which is a fascinating story of
demographics." Potato tubers provide starch and vitamins in abundance,
but the fruits of the plants are to be avoided - they contain solanine,
one of the poisonous alkaloids of the Nightshade family.
Dr Edward
Giovannucci, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard
School of Public Health, conducted experiments in the late 1990s to show
that men who ate two or more servings of tomatoes a week reduced their
chances of developing prostate cancer. It's all due to the lycopene
found in tomatoes. "The shape of the lycopene molecule makes it very
effective in being able to quench free radicals," he says.
"We
don't really understand it entirely yet, but lycopene may have specific
properties that protect the cell in a way other antioxidants may not."
Investigations continue into the ability of tomatoes to help reduce
blood pressure, prevent strokes and reduce cholesterol.
Red
peppers too are being investigated to see if they can help reduce the
risk of developing Parkinson's Disease, and the whole family is
considered to be, "the most promising plant species to develop as
efficacious and safer medicines for diabetes and its complications,"
according to the Journal of Drug Delivery and Therapeutics.
The
Nightshades are a diverse group of plants that feed us, poison us, send
us on mind-bending trips, dull pain and look pretty in gardens (petunias
are part of the family). From witches brew to modern medicine, they
are still fundamentally part of our lives and they continue to work
their magic.
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