The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

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14 July 2015 Share 'Remark
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Nightshades have a deadly reputation but these

In today's Magazine
plants, steeped in myth and folklore, have been
used for thousands of years for medicinal
purposes. And they may have properties that 'I call my OCD Olivia'
could keep us healthy today, writes Mary Colwell.
What happened to
Michael?

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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

"J K Rowling was extremely good at botany, and one Does sex addiction really
of the plants she put into Harry Potter was exist?
mandrake," says Sandy Knapp, head of the Plants
Division at the Natural History Museum in London. Moscow beavers resist
dam destruction
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. Could th
plastic p
"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."
How Tom
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.

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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

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The last

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

An illustration from De Materia Medica by the Greek physician Dioscorides, made in 1460 'I was to

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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

Find out more

Nine facts about Nightshades

Natural Histories is a series about our relationships with the natural world

Listen to Nightshades on BBC Radio 4

Californ
The plant also features in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "What with loathsome victims?
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 Elsewh
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.

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 Most R
mandrakes were always drawn with heads, then the bodies would be the roots with
the legs crossed." Woman's
claim reje
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 Melbourn
thousands of years. But the dose has to be right. dead afte

"In essence, if you were to consume it you would basically get hallucinations, Thousand
dizziness and increased heart rate, and you could get disturbed vision as a shooting s
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. Ryanair p
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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 Supermar
be found in the Bible in the Book of machine c

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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

Genesis (30:14) where Rachel tells

Chinese h
Leah she can spend the night with her secret coi
husband in exchange for mandrakes,
which she hopes will help her to 'Remarka
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But the roots were also used for The game

dastardly deeds by murderers and a years in h
relative of mandrake, henbane, is
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his wife in 1910. atomic bo

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SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

An illustration published in the Netherlands

circa 1175

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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

GETTY IMAGES

Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen

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."

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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

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.

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

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 high levels of solanine, one of the poisonous alkaloids of the

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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

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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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

The berry of a deadly nightshade

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The plant that can kill and cure - BBC News 11/9/18, 3(39 PM

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