The Herb Woman
HISTORY Foxglove: a secret recipe becomes a heart drug
In 1775 the English physician William Withering was asked his opinion about a family recipe for dropsy (swelling from heart failure) that, he wrote, "had long been kept a secret by an old woman in Shropshire, who had sometimes made cures after the more regular practitioners had failed." Of the twenty or so herbs in it, he worked out that the active one was foxglove. After ten years of careful trials he published An Account of the Foxglove (1785). Its descendant, digoxin, is still used for heart conditions today.
MYTH ALERT
You may have heard of "Mother Hutton", the wise woman who sold Withering the secret. She never existed: she was invented in 1928 for an advertising campaign by the drug company Parke-Davis. Withering never says he met the woman at all. The real story is quieter, and still remarkable: folk knowledge pointed a scientist to the right plant.
HISTORY Willow bark: from village cure to aspirin
Willow bark had been used against fever and pain since antiquity. In 1763 the English clergyman Edward Stone, struck by how bitter it tasted, dried a pound of it and gave the powder to about fifty feverish people, then reported his success to the Royal Society. The active compound, salicin, was isolated in the 1820s; its chemical cousin acetylsalicylic acid became Aspirin in 1899.
HISTORY The flying ointment
Witches were said to fly to their gatherings after rubbing themselves with ointment. Around 1545 the Spanish physician Andrés Laguna, working in Metz, found a jar of such ointment and tested it on the insomniac wife of the city's executioner. She slept for 36 hours and woke describing vivid dreams. Laguna identified narcotic plants in it, including hemlock and nightshade. Modern pharmacology explains why: plants like deadly nightshade, henbane and mandrake contain tropane alkaloids (atropine, scopolamine) that cause delirium and the sensation of flying or falling.
DO NOT TRY THIS
These plants are seriously poisonous; the dose that causes hallucinations is close to the dose that kills, and it varies from plant to plant. This is history and chemistry, not a recipe. If someone offers you a "flying ointment", say no.
On the Dance Floor
The herb woman's real skill was attention: she noticed what helped. Tonight, notice one thing that helps your dance — water at the right moment, a pause, bare feet, closing your eyes — and write it down afterwards. That's your own small herbal.
DONE WHEN...
You can tell the foxglove and willow stories accurately (including the Mother Hutton myth), and explain why "flying ointment" is chemistry, not magic, and dangerous.
References & Resources
Withering, W. (1785). An Account of the Foxglove, and Some of Its Medical Uses: With Practical Remarks on Dropsy, and Other Diseases. Birmingham.
Stone, E. (1763). An account of the success of the bark of the willow in the cure of agues. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 53, 195–200.
Laguna, A. (1555). Pedacio Dioscorides Anazarbeo, acerca de la materia medicinal y de los venenos mortiferos (commentary on Dioscorides). Antwerp.
"Mother Hutton" — on the 1928 Parke-Davis invention, see the Wikipedia article "Mother Hutton" and its sources.