Treatment of sickness in pioneer days

[Eva Elisabeth]

Bill, I studied biology (and English and North American culture and literature), and the topic of my degree dissertation was herbal drugs and their cultural meaning and influence (also on writers and literature).

Now then allow me this aside: One of my "favorite" were fly agarics (or fly amanitas). A similar idiom to "to go Berserk" in German is to be "as strong as a Berserk". Berserks, as you may know, were Germanic warriors, primarily mentioned in Scandinavian literature, who faught in an uncontrollable fury ("mad as hounds or wolves, they slew men, but neither fire nor iron had effect upon them"). But why were the Berserks like this? An unproven legend says because they ate fly agarics. (North American tribes and Mayas consumed them, too.) Fly agarics cause uncontrollable aggression, but, depending on the level of the active agent and way of preparation another effect is a perceived distorsion in the size of objects with which Lewis Carroll obviously was familiar: The caterpillar offers Alice to eat a piece of fly agaric to make herself bigger and smaller. (To prevent a self-suggesting question: NO, I have never tried any drugs! BTW, to be correct: biologically mushrooms are a kingdom of their own, they are no plants!)