Wysteria Blend
Friday, October 07, 2005
Stories of SalemWith Bam's insistence, I finished reading "Acceptable Risk" by Robin Cook. Wow! She's right! That book was something. It's a contemporary suspense novel that fuses modern medicine with the truth about the Salem Witch trials.
I never really gave what went on during the Salem With trials much pondering. I just always thought that they were a bunch of people practicing Wicca or something like it. It turns out that they're far from being witches. Based on the facts presented by Robin Cook in this novel, what caused the "witches" to act the way they did was caused by what you can most probably call drugs. During the olden days, only the poor ate rye bread because there was a surplus of the crop and they could easily make it. However, since they did not have proper storage places for their food, they grew molds. These molds contained some kind of (I think it was) ergot which is the main ingredient in modern day LSD. So the "witches" never invited devils into their homes. The hallucinations and mutilations they were experiencing were merely caused by this type of fungus.
In the novel this scientist named Edward and a few other colleagues decided to research on the mold, which were leftovers from a storage bin found in the old home of a "witch" descendant in Salem. They turned it into a medicine called Ultra which they claimed is an anti-depressant, enhances long-term memory and sense of smell, and brings out the confidence of a person; however, forgetfulness and violence were some of its side effects. How did they know that? They tested the drugs on themselves to see what it can do without testing its toxicity. After a month of taking the drugs they turned animal-like, mutilating themselves, animals, and even other people. They became just like the accused witches.
Which brings me to another thought. Nowadays, there are other ways to test drugs for toxicity. What happened to people of the stone age when technology was still non-existent?
