WITHERING HEIGHTS

William Withering trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh, probably the most important medical school in the world when he got his M.D. in 1776. As a well-tutored man he studied and published scientific papers on minerology and chemistry and was a first class botanist.   His intellectual life was exercised and enriched by  membership in the Lunar Society of Birmingham where he would wine and dine and exchange views on current science with the likes of Joseph Priestley who first (according to the British) isolated oxygen. Other famous members of the club included James Watt, improving and manufacturing the steam engine, Josiah Wedgwood who made porcelain and Erasmus Darwin, physician and grandfather to Charles.
   In 1775 Withering's opinion was sought regarding a herbal mixture that was being used by 'an old woman in Shropshire' to successfully treat 'dropsy' or congestive heart failure. Her mixture contained over twenty ingredients; but, said the doctor, "It was not difficult for me to perceive that the active herb could be no other than the Foxglove". For the next ten years until he published "An Account of the Foxglove" in 1786, he set about quite scientifically to discover how best to use the 'beautiful green powder'. He admitted that at first he was using a too strong dosage that produced a violent vomiting. He needed to find the amount that would slow the pulse rate and produce a stronger pumping action from the failing heart with less of the emetic side effect.
   So the eminent doctor had taken a folk medicine and gave us our first modern 'wonder drug'.

     Purple Foxglove, Digitalis purpurea is a much admired wayside wild flower that was welcomed into the English "cottage garden'. I would love to see it invade Ontario as it is one of very few shade tolerant plants that is tall growing. Unfortunately this biennial's first year foliage rosette rarely overwinters. (It does very well in British Columbia.) Remembering the shabby treatment accorded the beautiful Purple Loosestrife, perhaps we don't deserve it.
   Children and Foxglove have gotten along wonderfully well for generations before Withering and in the two hundred years since his great achievement. Now we have the overly anxious spoiling this idyll. We are told that children must not drink rainwater out of the flowers for fear of poisoning. Why do people say such things ? A Foxglove flower would make a better lampshade than a tumbler. They hang down. They don't collect water. Even if a bloom is detached and used as a drinking glass, the drug dose would be safely homeopathic.
   It is perfectly obvious that despite Foxglove being so medicinally potent, that in fact, children are not poisoned. The leaves of Digitalis are bitter. If a child chewed a leaf it would be spat out. In the highly unlikely case where a leaf is actually swallowed, it would immediately be ejected by vomiting.
   I neither want to make light of foxgloves toxicity nor have people be fearful of a desirable flower; I wish only to make the point that in real life children are not harmed. It does not happen.