TORREYA 



October, 1917. 

 Vol. 17 No. 10 



MUSHROOM POISONING 



By Beaman Douglass, M.D. 



I am not a botanist, I am a. surgeon. For me, hunting mush- 

 rooms is a pastime, eating them an adventure. Therefore this 

 paper on Mushroom Poisoning is not a scientific communication 

 with new and startling discoveries, it is rather a semi-popular 

 article aimed to restrain the hazardous and interest the inquisi- 

 tive. 



The purpose of my message will be lost should my readers 

 share the opinion of the physician in Maine who was called to 

 aid me, when last summer (191 6) I had involved the three 

 members of my family in difficulties with a poisonous form of 

 mushroom. He said: "Everybody knows that there is one 

 edible mushroom, all the rest are poisonous toadstools." I 

 showed him the ponderous work of Mcllvaine, wherein is stated 

 that most of more than one thousand forms are not poisonous. 

 I showed him the pessimistically enlarged black list of the 

 United States Department of Agriculture, which, including even 

 doubtful forms and erring well to the side of safety, publishes 

 seventy-two varieties as "poisonous or suspected of being 

 poisonous." Every effort failed to move this physician from 

 his standpoint and he left us with the warning in the future 

 "to leave those things entirely alone" — a warning, I may say, 

 which we have obstinately not adopted. As far as I am concerned, 

 I have always looked upon the result of his advice as an over- 

 throw and defeat of one of the "pure sciences" by prejudice 

 and ignorance. 



It happened this way: We identified some mushrooms growing 



[No. 9, Vol. 17 of ToRREYA, comprising pp. 151-170 was issued 2 October iQiV-l 



171 



