The Botanical Origins of a Medieval Madness

The Botanical Origins of a Medieval Madness

A brief history of Ergot and LSD

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The Land of Cockaigne, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1567. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

For the discerning caveman, the focus required to not die from ingesting the

wrong thing—a leaf, a berry, a bug—must have absorbed considerable attention.

As any wild plant expert would likely tell you, a case of mistaken botanical identity

can be fatal; confuse poison hemlock for a wild carrot and it will probably be the

last thing you do. Thankfully,the spread of agriculture and the emergence of

cultivation soothed many of these fears, so that by the Renaissance the question

of what was poisonous came to be chiefly the concern of medicine, where healing

often came down to trial-and-error by toxicology. “What is there that is not

poison?” once remarked the sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus. “All things

are poison, and nothing is without poison: the dose alone makes a thing not

poison.”

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