Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Summertime brings a lot of things to a farm, but one of my favorite things is the giant piles of vine ripened tomatoes. I can eat them plain, dry them, turn them into salsa, and a ton of different tomato sauces pretty much until Summer drifts right into winter.

Rarely do I think much about the plant, though.

Which is weird, because I love herbs and alchemy, and tomatoes come from a truly remarkable family.

First off, tomatoes are closely related to deadly nightshade, which explains why the awesome fruit was not initially well-received. Pretty much everyone assumed that tomatoes were just as toxic, perhaps even more so. Hardly surprising, red is often a warning coloration in nature, and it is far more flamboyant than the yellow fruits common to most of the rest of the nightshade family.

In fact, it was so strongly believed to be toxic that a rash of attempted assassinations featured the fruit. The most famous of these attempted murders was on George Washington while he was president. Obviously, that attempt was completely unsuccessful, and in retrospect kind of entertaining, but at the time it was taken quite seriously.

And it should have been. Nightshade, tomato’s kissing cousin, has had a strange love-hate relationship with humanity. As with many other toxic substances, nightshade was once popular in beauty treatments, in particular one that led to ‘sparkling eyes’. A tincture made from nightshade and appropriately diluted would be dropped into the young woman’s eyes daily.

Sure, this is just as bad an idea as it sounds like. In reaction to the tincture, the girl’s pupils would dilate, widening to their fullest. Her eyes would also tear excessively, not to the point of sobbing, but to the point of shimmering. This ‘look’ was highly sought after in the middle ages, an ethereal waif-like look, with wide shining eyes, and girls paid dearly for it.

At its best, the tincture caused eye irritation, and due to the pupil dilation serious discomfort in daylight. If the tincture was too strong, actual and permanent blindness could result.

Of course, this is little different from any modern medicine.

Foxglove is the flower that provides the modern drug digitalis. In small doses it can control some heart issues. Too large a dose will stop the heart. One of the scariest to me lately is the blood thinning drug warfarin, which you may see advertised on any television channel. You may not remember that warfarin is also rat poison, which advertised that it killed rats and left them odorless. The odorless aspect resulted from the drug micro-perforating the rats’ intestines and allowing their thinned blood to drain out into the abdominal cavity. Blood loss like this encourages mummification, especially in a creature as small and streamlined as a rat.

To control life-threatening blood pressure issues this might not be such a bad plan. I have to say it seems like an exercise in idiocy to play with known poisons just to possibly get the attention of some guy. Lifetime of blindness risked over a guy that couldn’t see you were worth his time without ultra-sparkly eyeballs.

Oh well, at least the tomatoes turned out to be deliciously non-toxic.

Cheers,

Michelle