Hitting the pause button

Jimsonweed flower

I'm going to hit the “pause” button on this blog for a while, and I'm not sure how long for. This is due to an upcoming house move and various other things which demand my attention. But in this final post (for now) I'd like to summarise progress so far, so you don't have to scroll back through dozens of earlier posts. 

I started this blog in September 2019 mainly to document my progress in developing plant-based anaesthetics of the kind used in earlier times, either in times of war or before the emergence of the modern pharmaceutical / industrial complex. Plant based anaesthetics have been used to relieve human suffering for thousands of years. The surgeons who travelled with the Roman armies used a combination of opium, mandrake root and alcohol to dull pain. Medieval monks and village healers or “cunning-folk” used combinations of herbs including henbane, monkshood, jimsonweed and belladonna for similar purposes. The British Government encouraged farmers to grow crops of these plants in World War 2 when the country was blockaded by German U-boats and supplies of raw materials could not be easily obtained from the continent, which was mostly under German occupation. You can download a free digitised copy of the British WW2 manual for farmers here.

Just knowing what plants were used is not enough. You have to learn how to grow them, preserve them and reconstitute them in a useable and/or palatable form. All of these present challenges. 

Opium poppy (ornamental, of course)

Recreating the original go-to Roman anaesthetic (opium, mandrake root and alcohol) is impractical in Britain for two reasons. Firstly, one of the principal ingredients – the Mediterranean mandrake – is a plant adapted to the Mediterranean climate, which is hot and dry, quite unlike the British climate which is cool and wet. It is only possible to grow mandrakes here in glasshouses, not out in the field, and unless you have a really big glasshouse, it's just not practical to grow them in useable quantities. Secondly, although it is legal to grow opium poppies for ornamental purposes, it is illegal to prepare extracts from them without a Government licence. 

The plants used by medieval northern European herbalists (henbane, monkshood, jimsonweed and belladonna) are fairly easy to grow, particularly in the warmer southern parts of Britain. However, I have faced challenges in converting the plants into useable medicinal preparations. When farmers grew them in WW2, the crops were sent away in bulk to factories to be processed, and were probably shredded and dissolved in industrial organic solvents which were then distilled to produce concentrated extracts. However, this is not practical if you are doing it on a cottage industry scale. 

It would be helpful if I had some medieval recipes to work from. However, most recipes were probably never written down but were passed on orally from mother to daughter, or from master to apprentice. Where recipes were written down, they were written in medieval English or Latin, which is impossible for anyone except a scholar of medieval languages to decipher. I was hoping that a Cambridge University project, “Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries”, would result in some of the recipes being translated into modern English and made publicly available, but so far this hasn't happened. 

I have tried to invent my own recipes using basic principles of herbal medicine but with so far disappointing results. Dissolving the plant extracts in beeswax and rubbing it on my skin had no noticeable effect (apart from giving me nice soft skin), although subsequent research suggested that beeswax has too high a melting point to be effective for this purpose, and lard or shea butter (a fatty nut extract) with a lower melting point might work better. 

Henbane flower

One recipe I found suggested roasting henbane seeds and inhaling the smoke. I tried that – it didn't work, and I suspect the medieval person who recorded this recipe had probably never tried it himself, but was just repeating some garbled and half-understood information from someone else. Imagine what would happen if it really did work; the patient and the surgeon would both be inhaling the smoke, and you would have a semi-conscious surgeon operating on a semi-conscious patient. 

I tried dissolving belladonna root in 37.5% proof alcohol (Bacardi). The smell was so nauseating that I couldn't bring myself to drink it. This is probably one of the body's defence mechanisms kicking in, telling you instinctively that this is poison and not to consume it. 

Monkshood flower

The main success I have had so far is chewing a fresh monkshood leaf. This was quite palatable and definitely gave me a local anaesthetic effect, which might be useful for oral procedures such as tooth extraction, but fresh ingredients are only going to be available at certain times of the year, so for other times you will need to learn how to preserve and reconstitute the ingredients. 

My research is continuing, but that's where things are at the moment. Like Captain Oates, who wandered out into an Antarctic blizzard in 1912 to look for the washroom, I may be gone for some time. Until then I can be contacted at toxicplantsblog (at) gmail.com. 

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin