Book review: The Old Vegetable Neurotics, Hemlock, Opium, Belladonna and Henbane (1869)
Book cover, "The Old Vegetable Neurotics" It may seem odd to be reviewing a book which is over 150 years old, but let me explain the background to it. For the last few years I have been trying to recreate the plant based anaesthetics used in ancient Greek and Roman times, medieval Europe, and more recently in World Wars 1 and 2, for a thought experiment: what would we do for anaesthetics if civilisation collapsed and global supply chains and the pharmaceutical industry no longer functioned? Recipes for making these anaesthetics must have existed in times past, but it is difficult to find them today, either because they have disintegrated through passage of time, or they were never written down because the practitioners who used them were illiterate, or they are written in medieval English or Latin and are hard to understand. Opium poppies growing on Douglas Promenade, Isle of Man I am hoping that an ongoing research project, Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries may ...