Fantastically Wrong: The Strange History of Using Organ-Shaped Plants to Treat Disease

Eat a Walnut and treat your brain







According to the doctrine of signatures, plants and nuts and vegetables that resemble a human body part or organ must be divined by God to treat said limb or organ. Thus should a walnut fix your brain if it gets too wrinkled ... or something. Original Images: Getty

IT’S HARD TO imagine being the first human being to look at a plant like, say, a stinging nettle and think, “I probably shouldn’t eat this, on account of the general agony it would cause me. But what if I cooked it first?” So you prepare it and nervously drop it down your gullet—and luckily enough, it turns out to be edible. But what if it hadn’t been? And what if there wasn’t a decent gastroenterologist nearby?

Fantastically Wrong

It's OK to be wrong, even fantastically so. Because when it comes to understanding our world, mistakes mean progress. From folklore to pure science, these are history’s most bizarre theories.

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For tens of thousands of years before modern medicine, choosing plants that not only wouldn’t kill you, but could cure you of ills was an exercise in trial and error. So wouldn’t it be nice if nature (or God, who I guess would also be nature in a way) dropped hints as to which ones were good for the human body? Such thinking, known as the doctrine of signatures, actually developed with remarkable frequency all around the world from culture to culture. Plants meant to heal certain organs and body parts, like the liver or the eye, must show a certain “signature” by resembling the thing they treat.

The 16th Century  physician, Paracelsius wrote extensively on the doctrine of signatures in a tiny notebook.

This may be the first example of  "Precision Medicine."