The Herbs
New plants added as the reels go live. Click an available herb to read its handout.
Stramonium
Datura is a powerful, genuinely poisonous plant; even small amounts of its tropane alkaloids can cause delirium, and historic doses have killed. The material below is shared for its historical, botanical, and educational interest only. It is not medical advice and not a recommendation to gather, prepare, or use the plant in any form.
Native most likely to West Asia and India, the thorn-apple was unknown to the fathers of German botany in the early 1500s. It seems to have travelled into Europe with the migrating Roma, who carried the seeds as a charm to banish spells — and since the first Roma reached Germany around 1417, that may be when this “mad-herb” first appeared at their camps.
As a folk remedy it took far stronger hold in Eastern Europe and West Asia than in the West. Along the Volga, toothache was eased by inhaling the smoke; in Russia the fresh leaves were laid on burns; and in the Kursk region it was a remedy for erysipelas.
Its narcotic power had a darker side too. Madaus relays the lore: a woman seeking a night’s lodging in Galicia was said to have poisoned an entire household with thorn-apple leaves, and Turkish wives reportedly used the seeds to put unfaithful husbands to sleep. A sobering accident stands beside the legends — two elderly people took a tablespoon of the seeds, cooked with beer and bread, for a stitch in the side. Within half an hour came dizziness, stupor, and convulsions; the man was saved with emetics, but the woman, who refused further treatment, died.
In Mexico, a whole row of Datura species (“Toloachi”) were prized as an almost divine narcotic — a deep sleep with vivid, erotic dreams and a dreamy indifference to the world, paid for afterward with a fierce hangover. In Peru it was reputed an aphrodisiac.
The earliest herbalists said almost nothing of its virtues; Matthiolus even warned it would “derange a man just as if he were drunk.” The plant entered formal medicine through Störck in 1762, who recorded its action in cramps, epilepsy, and madness. Hufeland later called it “perhaps the strongest narcotic after opium.”
Its great classic use was for asthma: the leaves were rolled into “asthma cigarettes,” the smoke of one gram of leaf carrying roughly 0.1 mg of atropine. The French psychiatrist Moreau treated eleven patients tormented by hallucinations with thorn-apple extract; of ten, seven were healed. Rademacher used it for “brain-fever” and eye inflammation; Bentley and Trimen as a pain- and cramp-stilling remedy for neuralgia, rheumatism, epilepsy, and spasmodic asthma; and Juster and Huerre found it eased the stiffness of Parkinsonism, though it scarcely touched the tremor.
Chemically, the leaves carry 0.3–0.5% tropane alkaloids — chiefly l-hyoscyamine and atropine, with a little scopolamine. In homeopathy, from Hahnemann onward, it became above all a remedy for disorders of mind and mood. Madaus’s own test of potency was memorable: a single drop of the fresh-plant tincture still visibly widened a cat’s pupil.
For asthma, the leaves were smoked as cigarettes (two parts tobacco to one part leaf) or soaked in saltpetre, dried, and burned for fumigation — always, the text warns, “cautiously and in pauses, since narcosis comes easily.” The seed extract was given in tiny pills as an antispasmodic, sedative, and analgesic for epilepsy, asthma, chorea, and painful periods.
By Madaus’s day it lived mostly in homeopathy, prescribed for strong “brain-irritation” and a tendency to spasm: epilepsy, chorea, whooping cough, and above all nervous and bronchial asthma; and for disturbances of the mind — mania, delirium (including delirium tremens), hallucinations, migraine, trigeminal neuralgia, and weeping melancholy. One of its most vivid keynotes: a restless night-fear in which the patient can only sleep with a light on.
Most of the literature points to the leaves (or the whole flowering herb), and to the ripe seeds. The homeopathic pharmacopoeia took the fresh herb gathered just as flowering begins, together with the ripe seeds; the “Teep” tablet was made from the fresh leaves.
The old figures are tiny, and that is the whole point. Leaf tincture was given in 5–10 drops (Leclerc); for asthma, about 1.5 g of leaf was smoked; the homeopathic dilution was D4. It was strictly prescription-only, with very low ceiling doses — for the leaf, just 0.2 g per dose and 0.6 g per day — a sharp reminder of how narrow the line is between a remedy and a poison.
