Solanaceae
Atropa belladonna
Deadly nightshade · Belladonna
- Part used
- leafroot
- Native range
- Europe, north Africa and western Asia
- Morphology
- A branching perennial to a metre and a half, with dull green oval leaves, solitary drooping bell flowers in a dull purple-brown, and glossy black berries the size of a small cherry sitting in a five-pointed green calyx.
What is in it
Evidence
Its isolated alkaloids are foundational drugs — atropine in bradycardia, organophosphate poisoning and ophthalmology; scopolamine in motion sickness. That is a statement about the compounds. The plant has no controlled therapeutic use.
Safety
Among the most dangerous plants in Europe. As little as a few berries can kill a child. Poisoning presents as the classic anticholinergic syndrome — dilated pupils, dry flushed skin, fever, urinary retention, agitation and hallucination, progressing to seizure and respiratory failure. Alkaloid content varies enormously between plants and seasons, so no preparation has a predictable strength.
Interactions: Additive with all anticholinergic drugs, including many antihistamines and tricyclics
Regulatory: Not a permitted listed-medicine ingredient. Atropine and scopolamine are prescription medicines.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Used as a poison in antiquity and as an anaesthetic and sedative in medieval surgery, often in the soporific sponge alongside opium and henbane. The Italian common name means beautiful lady, from the cosmetic use of the juice to dilate the pupils.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
The Solanaceae are the family that most rewards knowing your plants, because they contain the potato, the tomato, the aubergine and the chilli alongside this, henbane, datura and tobacco. A family name tells you where something sits on the tree of life and nothing whatever about whether you can eat it.
Atropine is named after Atropos, the Fate who cuts the thread, which is an unusually candid piece of botanical naming.
Its medieval use is worth taking seriously as pharmacology. The soporific sponge — belladonna, henbane and opium — was genuine surgical anaesthesia several centuries before ether, and it worked. The problem was never that it did nothing. It was that the margin between unconscious and dead depended on which plant, picked when, from where.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.