THE PERSONAL FACTOR IN MUSHROOM 

 POISONING 



John Dearness 



It is an old saying that what is one man's meat is another 

 man's poison. Doubtless every reader has a few acquaintances 

 whose dietetic idiosyncrasies are matter of remark among their 

 friends. I happen to know two persons who are made ill by 

 eating cake or other food containing egg, — never by eating eggs 

 themselves, because neither could be bribed to taste them wil- 

 lingly. Not a few have to pay the penalty of total abstinence 

 from some delicacy for having once indulged in a surfeit of it. 

 Possibly the majority of us have discovered some generally whole- 

 some article of diet which it is prudence on our part to avoid. 



One of the theories offered to explain some of these vagaries 

 of digestion is that many kinds of food, particularly those for 

 which a taste has to be acquired, contain substances — call them 

 poisons if you like — which our leucocytes have to learn to neu- 

 tralize. Another theory is that in the chemical laboratory of the 

 digestive system there are made a great variety of compounds; 

 in exceptional cases or under exceptional circumstances, some of 

 these may be poisonous enough to cause auto-intoxication. The 

 imagination, too, sometimes exercises a remarkable influence upon 

 the digestive organs. Workers in a logging camp are not apt to 

 be squeamish. I knew of a case where one of a number of them 

 who had just disposed very acceptably of a deep pie, on being 

 informed of the kind of meat it contained, was immediately seized 

 with violent mal de mer. 



In Dr. Murrill's " Poisonous Mushrooms," Mycologia 2 : 255- 

 264, the statement recurs, in effect if not in words, " harmless to 

 some, poisonous to others." The question naturally arises why 

 such opposite effects as nutrition and poison from so many spe- 

 cies of one group of plants. Inquiry into the causes may be 

 regarded as practical in view of the fact that there are easily ten 



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