Beware of wicked vegetation

Question: Plants can nourish and heal, but what are a few of Mother Nature's truly "wicked plants," such as the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother?

Answer: Cows that eat white snakeroot produce the poison milk that likely undid Nancy Hanks Lincoln, leaving behind 9-year-old Abraham, says Amy Stewart in her book of the above title. Milk sickness was so common that Milk Sick Ridge and Milk Sick Cove are still attached to Southern locales where the disease was rampant.

Stewart points also to a tree that sheds poison daggers, a glistening red seed that stops the heart, a shrub that causes paralysis and a vine that can strangle — "you don't want to meet these in a dark alley."

Other historical wickednesses include the poison hemlock that killed the Greek philosopher Socrates; ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and causes wild hallucinations, perhaps underlying the deranged behavior leading to the Salem witch trials; monkshood, with a toxin so powerful Nazi scientists used it in poison bullets. Even simple corn, when grossly overeaten, can cause the ghastly symptoms of pellagra, a syndrome that may have inspired European myths of vampirism in Bram Stoker's "Dracula": pale skin that erupted in blisters when exposed to the sun, sleepless nights brought on by dementia and a morbid appearance just before death.

"Yet without question," concludes Stewart, "the world's most wicked plant is tobacco (nicotiana tabacum), responsible for the deaths of 90 million people worldwide."

Question: Love might be "blind," but wouldn't even blind lovers prefer pairing up with attractive partners?

Answer: Some do, as discussed by University of Birmingham professor John Hull, who himself went blind, says David G. Myers in "Psychology." A colleague's remarks on a woman's beauty would strongly affect how Hull felt. He found this "deplorable … What can it matter to me what sighted men think of women … yet I do care, and I do not seem able to throw off this prejudice."

Over-emphasis on looks seems unfair and unenlightened. As the Roman statesman Cicero expressed it two thousand years ago, "The final good and the supreme duty of the wise person is to resist appearance."

A recent analysis of 100 top-grossing films found that attractive characters were portrayed as morally superior to unattractive ones, perhaps explicable in terms of everyday attitudes. But Hollywood's modeling doesn't explain why even babies — to judge from their measured "gazing times" — prefer looking at attractive over unattractive faces!

Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@cs.com © Bill Sones and Rich Sones, Ph.D.