The dark lore of Deadly Nightshade

Atropa belladonna, or Deadly Nightshade, is native to Europe. Drawing from 1887 edition of "Kohler's Medicinal Plants."

“Hot as a hare, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet and mad as a hen.”

This centuries-old text describes symptoms that can be caused by Atropa belladonna, more commonly known as Belladonna, or Deadly Nightshade. The beautiful, but highly toxic, plant “is very interesting in that it has this dark lore associated with witches,” says Kristen Cross, an Emory junior majoring in biology and environmental studies.

Cross recently gave a presentation on Deadly Nightshade, as part of Emory’s Botanical Medicine and Health class taught by enthnobotanist Cassandra Quave. Click here to watch a video of her talk.

Kurt Stuber/Wikipedia Commons

Atropine and hyoscine are the chemicals that make the plant toxic, as well as giving it potent medicinal and intoxicating effects. Consumption of only a few berries from the Deadly Nightshade can be lethal.

Women mixed Deadly Nightshade and other plants together to make “flying ointments,” Cross says. “They would get together at night and have these rituals where they would experience sensations of flying and euphoria.”

Women in Venice used drops made from Deadly Nightshade to make their pupils dilate and increase the allure of their eyes. It was also used in ocular surgery during the 1800s to make it easier to remove cataracts.

Today, extracts from Deadly Nightshade are showing promise for treatment of depression and nausea, among other benefits. The plant “is on the dangerous border of very poisonous and very useful,” Cross notes.

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Seeing is believing: Where science meets religion

Inverted qualia: What is the relationship of a strawberry's physical properties to the human imagination and physical brain state? Image: Was a Bee/Wikipedia Commons.

Mysteries surrounding awareness, particularly visual awareness, have intrigued philosophers for centuries. Now we are developing tools to study the brain and awareness in a quantifiable manner.

Emory biologist Alex Escobar, whose research is currently focused on this topic, says that we produce bits of awareness, called “qualia,” in our brain. Much like the points of color in a Seurat painting, these bits of awareness create an overall understanding of the sky, trees or people on a lakeshore.

In a way, “you are the scene that you’re perceiving,” Escobar says. “Everything that you experience is actually part of who you are.”

Escobar believes that the field of awareness is the point where science and religion meet. “When we fully begin to understand it, we’re going to open the door to a whole new way of understanding ourselves and the world around us,” he says.



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'Blade Runner' blows past our ideas of 'disability'

Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics, wrote about Oscar Pistorius, the South African amputee who is running in the 2012 Olympics, as a guest blogger for CNN.com. Dubbed the “Blade Runner,” for his high-tech, carbon-fiber “Cheetah” legs, Pistorius assembled his own legal and scientific team to make a successful bid to compete in the Olympics. But, as Wolpe writes, the story is far from over, with no general guidelines about the future use of “adaptive sports equipment.” An excerpt from the article:

Photo by Elvar Paisson/Wikipedia Commons.

“The issue will have to be revisited by each new athlete who wants to use artificial mechanisms in competition. …

“We do not ultimately know the degree to which technology mimics true physiological function. What if an amputee high jumper wants to use Cheetahs; what level of springiness is "fair" against able-bodied athletes? What about a swimmer who wants to use prosthetic hands or legs? Or an archer whose prosthetic arm does not tremble like an arm of flesh and blood? We do not have metrics that can determine true equivalence with able-bodied athletes.

“Then there is the issue of fairness. In this year's U.S. Olympic trials, Dathan Ritzenhein, the two-time Olympian and 5k American record holder, was eliminated from the marathon team because of leg cramps. Pistorius cannot get cramps in his calves because he does not have any, and so he can never be eliminated based on this criterion.

“The Pistorius case confronts us with two important questions. What is a disability? And what is the rationale for elite sport?”

Read the whole article at CNN.com.

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Former Miss America discusses anorexia

Beauty pageants actually helped her heal from anorexia, says Kirsten Haglund. Photo by Kay Hinton.

By Mary Loftus, Emory Magazine

Kirsten Lora Haglund, Miss America 2008, is now a junior at Emory, majoring in political science. But as a girl growing up in Farmington Hills, Michigan, her dream was to become a ballerina.

And that was how the trouble with food began.

“When I was 12, I went away to a very intensive ballet camp for the summer. I was living away from home for the first time, and my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer,” Haglund says. “Also, I was going through puberty, and I dreaded that. As a ballet dancer you want to stay thin and graceful and elegant.”

She remembers the day she threw her lunch away for the first time. Everyone else was having a bit of granola, an apple. “I felt like a cow, eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich,” she says.

Not eating felt like being in complete control—at least of her own body. “I felt above mere mortals, that I could subsist without food. Restricting calories was accomplishing what other people couldn’t. It gave me significance. I was the skinny girl.”

Already tall and slim, Haglund started with the aim of losing five pounds, but that number rapidly escalated. She began severely restricting her food intake to just 900 calories a day, living mostly on Diet Coke, coffee, gum, lettuce, and an occasional spoonful of peanut butter or grilled chicken breast with lemon.

“I started to hate dancing,” she says. “I was tired and had no energy, and you always had to look in mirrors. I was never satisfied; I kept seeing parts of my body I hated more and more.”


Always a straight-A student, she was still excelling in school. But deep down, Haglund knew something was wrong. Her hair started to fall out, her nails became brittle, and she was always cold. She stopped having her period. She isolated, staying away from social functions with food or friends who asked questions. She lost 30 pounds in three years.

When her parents intervened and took her to a doctor, Haglund remembers, “I was so mad. And I hated that doctor. Now we’re friends, so I can say that.”

A physical showed that Haglund’s health, at 15, had already been compromised. She had osteopenia, a precursor to osteoporosis and renal insufficiency. She began seeing an eating disorder specialist, a nutritionist, and a psychologist, multiple times a week throughout high school.

“I can’t even remember now what I saw in the mirror when I was sick, because my eyes have changed,” she says. “But I do remember feeling that my willpower, the restrictions, were never enough. I kept a journal of what I ate and how much I exercised, and had a constant dialogue going on in my brain, whenever I consumed calories, of how and when I was going to burn them off.”

“Genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger,” Haglund adds. “I think I had both a genetic predisposition and also stressors, like ballet.”

But she overcame the disorder before entering her first pageant, Miss Oakland County—a stepping stone to Miss Michigan—at 17. She wanted to attend the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and needed scholarships to afford tuition. Haglund competed in the Miss Michigan pageant in June 2007. She won a preliminary swimsuit award and performed “Adele’s Laughing Song” from the operetta Die Fledermaus.

Haglund believes that pageants, rather than compromising her recovery from anorexia, actually helped her to heal.

“The ideal pageant body is much healthier than the ideal ballet dancer’s body,” she says.

At 19, she went on to represent Michigan in the Miss America 2008 pageant, a newly “modernized” version broadcast for the first time on the network TLC. The youngest of the 53 women vying for the crown, Haglund sang a Broadway-style rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” and her platform was eating disorder awareness.

On January 26, 2008, more than three million TV viewers watched as Haglund was crowned the eighty-third Miss America. With $60,000 in scholarship money, Haglund decided to resume college at Emory, largely because of its location in Atlanta and its top-20 standing.

She has continued to pursue her pageant platform by starting the Kirsten Haglund Foundation to assist girls who need treatment for eating disorders. The foundation has given financial assistance to 13 girls so far and has helped countless others by advocating for their treatment, assisting with insurance, and providing encouragement. Haglund speaks at events all over the country about body image and overcoming anorexia. “Parents can sometimes think it’s just a phase,” she says. “But if you catch it early, like anything else, there’s a much better chance for recovery.”

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Food fight: Colleges still a hot spot for eating disorders

Psychologist Linda Craighead, second from right, with graduate students in the Eating and Weight Concerns Center at Emory, with a "hunger meter" chart. Photo by Todd Deveau.

By Mary Loftus, Emory Magazine

Eating disorders are paradoxical: they are about control more than food, yet thoughts of food pervade almost every waking moment. The substance being abused can’t simply be avoided like drugs or alcohol.

The intent is often to achieve “the perfect body,” but the disorders actually harm, disfigure, even kill. And this all takes place within a culture that simultaneously glorifies eating well and being thin.

No wonder, then, that hot spots for eating disorders include universities, high-level performance sports, and the entertainment industry.

“Southern private schools do have a slightly higher rate, but all universities have more than we would like,” says Emory psychologist Linda Craighead, who specializes in eating disorders and weight concerns and is the author of The Appetite Awareness Workbook: How to Listen to Your Body and Overcome Binge Eating, Overeating and Obsession with Food. “Eating disorders cut across socioeconomic levels and all ethnicities.”

The most severe are anorexia and bulimia—the National Eating Disorder Association estimates that 10 million women and 1 million men in the U.S. struggle with one of these disorders—while millions more engage in binge eating or compulsive overeating. “At Emory’s counseling center, we see a lot of students, even medical students, with eating disorders,” Craighead says.

A person with anorexia typically falls below a certain weight—for adults, a body mass index of 18.5. Their diet is usually very restricted and often vegetarian, Craighead says.

“In many cases,” she says, “people who start with anorexia move on to binging and purging because the biological pressure to eat is so strong it breaks through now and then.”

Bulimia traditionally involves binging followed by a “maladaptive compensatory behavior”— mostly vomiting, but this can also take the form of laxatives, over-exercising, or fasting. “Most bulimics are close to normal weight, since purging is actually one of the least effective ways to compensate—about half the food stays in the body. So we try to teach bulimics in recovery to learn to be satisfied with just eating half the amount.”

Assistant Professor of Family and Preventive Medicine Teresa Beck treats patients with eating disorders and trains residents with a personal perspective. “I developed an eating disorder during medical school and hid it from my family for six years,” she says. “Mine started, just like most, with dieting to lose a few pounds. I use my experiences to help many of my patients with their own problems related to compulsive or emotional eating, obesity, poor body image, perfectionism, and all that goes along with that.”

Often, there’s a migration between all three disorders—anorexia, bulimia, and binging. “The contagion effect is huge,” says Craighead, which explains how eating disorders can run rampant through dorms and sororities. And dangerous new influences exist, like “pro-ana” groups on social media sites that glorify and offer tips about anorexia.

Health problems may not show up until middle age, and the main, irreversible consequence is bone loss. “You only have a window of time, twelve to twenty-three, to lay down all the bone that you’re going to get,” Craighead says. “You have to eat real food and have enough weight on. If your bones are fragile when you’re older, there’s no way to fix it.”

Nadine Kaslow, a professor of psychiatry at Emory and also the psychologist for the Atlanta Ballet, says eating disorders are prevalent among ballerinas. Kaslow has been involved in ballet since she was three, and says the dance culture has always supported extreme thinness.

“We used to have to wear our ideal weight and actual weight pinned to our leotards,” she says. “You weighed in once a week, and if you weren’t thin enough, you were publicly humiliated.”

It’s gotten better, says Kaslow, but “you are still reinforced for being thin, that’s just the normative expectation. A cultural shift is needed.”

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Mirror image: iStockphoto.com