Deadly nightshade is named after a Fate and a beautiful woman
When Linnaeus named deadly nightshade, he combined death and vanity. Atropa comes from Atropos, the Greek Fate who cuts the thread of life. Bella-donna is Italian for beautiful woman, after Renaissance women who used the plant as a cosmetic. It is a close relative of the tomato and one of the most toxic plants known.
Atropa bella-donna is a bushy perennial of the nightshade family, the group that also contains potatoes, tomatoes, aubergines, tobacco and chilli peppers. It grows to around 1.5 metres, with dull purple bell-shaped flowers and glossy black berries about 1.5 centimetres across. It is native from England eastwards through Europe to western Asia, and in Britain it is truly wild only in England, often on chalky soils. Elsewhere it has spread as an escape from old medicinal gardens.
Every part of the plant holds tropane alkaloids, chiefly atropine, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, which block parts of the nervous system that run automatic functions such as sweating, breathing and heart rate. Poisoning brings wide pupils, blurred vision, a racing heart, a parched mouth, confusion, hallucinations and seizures. The berries are sweet and tempting, which makes them most dangerous to children. In one 2009 case, an adult woman who mistook six berries for blueberries developed severe poisoning. Oddly, cattle and rabbits seem to eat it without harm, and birds spread its seeds.
Its dark reputation is ancient. Rumour in Rome held that the empress Livia murdered Augustus with the berry juice. Related nightshades served as medicine too: Theophrastus recommended mandrake in the 4th century BC, Cleopatra reportedly used an atropine-rich henbane extract to widen her pupils, and nightshade preparations, often mixed with opium, were used to dull surgical pain until modern anaesthetics took over in the 19th century.
The English name belladonna arrived through John Gerard's Herball of 1597, replacing the older word dwale. Linnaeus published the scientific name in 1753, writing it with a space, which botanical rules now treat as an error to be fixed with a hyphen. Chemistry caught up in 1831, when the German pharmacist Heinrich Mein isolated pure crystals of atropine, a compound still used in medicine.
Source: Atropa bella-donna
