Carl Linnaeus published the name Atropa belladonna in 1753. For the genus, he chose Atropa, after Atropos, the Greek Fate who cuts the thread of life with her shears. For the species, he chose belladonna, Italian for “beautiful woman,” after Venetian courtesans who dripped the plant’s juice into their eyes to dilate their pupils. Linnaeus put death in the genus and desire in the species.
Both names fit.
Belladonna belongs to the Solanaceae, the same nightshade family as Henbane: The Herb That Made Witches Fly and Vikings Kill, Mandrake: Root of Screams, Salves, and Story, tobacco, and the potato. It has been used to poison Roman emperors, to make medieval women believe they flew, and to treat Parkinson’s disease. Its primary alkaloid, atropine, sits on the WHO Essential Medicines list. Its secondary alkaloid, scopolamine, is a prescription patch for motion sickness. Roman assassins and modern pharmacists have found uses for the same plant, for very different reasons.
The Plant
Belladonna grows across Europe, North Africa, and western Asia. In Britain, it appears on chalk and limestone soils. On the continent, it favors forest clearings, ruins, and the edges of old walls. It is a branching perennial that reaches two meters tall, with dull purple bell-shaped flowers tinged yellow-green. The leaves are large and ovate, up to eighteen centimeters long.
The berries are the danger. They ripen from green to shiny black, about the size of a small cherry, and they taste sweet. Children eat them. Two or three berries can kill a child. For adults, estimates vary: some sources cite ten to twenty berries as the lethal range, others say as few as five. Alkaloid concentration shifts with the season, the soil, and which part of the plant is consumed. No one eating belladonna can predict the dose.
Birds spread the seeds and are unaffected by the alkaloids. Belladonna appears near ruins and old churchyards because birds perch on stones, deposit seeds, and the plant colonizes the rubble.
Two competing etymologies exist for the name. Pietro Andrea Mattioli recorded in 1544 that Italian women used the plant to dilate their pupils, and he called it “herba bella donna.” An alternative theory holds that the word is a corruption of Medieval Latin bladona (nightshade), possibly from Gaulish blatona, from Proto-Celtic blatus (flower). The cosmetic explanation may be a folk etymology layered over an older plant name. The debate is open.
Before the Italian name caught on, English speakers called the plant dwale (from Old Norse dvol, meaning sleep or trance), banewort (killer plant), devil’s cherries, and death cherries. John Gerard adopted “belladonna” in his Herball of 1597.
What It Does to You
The primary alkaloid in fresh belladonna is hyoscyamine. During extraction, hyoscyamine racemizes into atropine, the compound that gave the plant its modern medical career. A third alkaloid, scopolamine (also called hyoscine), is present in smaller quantities but crosses the blood-brain barrier more easily. Scopolamine is the one that causes hallucinations.
All three are anticholinergic. They block acetylcholine at muscarinic receptors throughout the body. The effects follow a predictable escalation.
Your pupils dilate. Your mouth goes dry. Your heart races. You flush red and cannot sweat, so your body temperature climbs. Smooth muscles relax. At higher doses: hallucinations. Higher still: delirium, convulsions, death.
Medical students learn the anticholinergic syndrome through a mnemonic: “Hot as a hare, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet, mad as a hatter.” Some versions add “bloated as a toad” and “the heart runs alone.”
In children, 10 milligrams of atropine or less can be fatal. In adults, the lethal dose is not precisely established, though fatalities have occurred at doses under 100 milligrams. The difficulty is that alkaloid levels in a living plant are never constant. A berry picked in June may contain half the atropine of one picked in September. The root concentrates more than the leaf. The same species grown in different soil produces different concentrations. Every number in the literature is an approximation.
Rome’s Favorite Poison
The most documented poisoner in Roman history is a woman named Locusta. In 54 CE, Agrippina hired her to poison Emperor Claudius. Tacitus (Annals 12.66) says the poison was applied to a dish of mushrooms. Claudius died. The following year, Nero summoned Locusta to poison his stepbrother Britannicus, who collapsed at dinner and died within minutes. Suetonius (Life of Nero 33) and Cassius Dio (61.34) confirm the sequence.
Ancient sources say “poison.” They do not specify belladonna. The symptoms described and the method of application to food are consistent with the anticholinergic profile. The connection is plausible. It is not proven.
A similar uncertainty surrounds the death of Augustus in 14 CE. Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Suetonius all relay the rumor that his wife Livia poisoned figs to kill him. Most modern historians dismiss this as political gossip. The poison, if any existed, is never identified.
Six centuries later and two thousand miles north, the stories grow stranger. Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historiae (1527) first told the story of King Duncan of Scotland poisoning Norwegian invaders with nightshade-laced food and ale during a truce. The Norwegians ate, slept, and were slaughtered. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (first edition 1577) retold it, calling the plant “mekilwort berries.” George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) used the phrase “somniferous nightshade.” Shakespeare drew from Holinshed for Macbeth. He never named belladonna directly. The plant sits in his source material, unnamed.
The Ointment That Made Witches Fly
The oldest known written description of a witch’s flying ointment appears in Johannes Hartlieb’s Das puch aller verpoten kunst (1456). By 1558, Giambattista della Porta had published a specific recipe in his Magia Naturalis. The Catholic Church noticed. In 1583, della Porta’s book landed on the Madrid Index of Prohibited Books. The 1589 second edition appeared with the recipe removed.
Between those events, a Spanish physician named Andrés de Laguna ran what may be the first pharmacological experiment on the ointment. Publishing in 1555, Laguna described confiscating a pot of green ointment composed of hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake. He tested it on the wife of an executioner, anointing her “head to foot.” The woman opened “her eyes wide like a rabbit,” then fell into a sleep so deep it lasted thirty-six hours. When she woke, she complained that someone had “taken her away from pleasurable experiences.” Laguna concluded the ointment produced drug-induced dreaming, not flight.
Johann Weyer took the pharmacological argument further in De praestigiis daemonum (1563). Weyer argued that witchcraft accusations reflected mental illness or drug-induced states. He noted that the ointment, applied to thin skin or mucous membranes, produced “the sensation of rising into the air and flying.” His ingredient list: henbane, deadly nightshade, mandrake, ergot.
Scopolamine absorbs through the skin. Mixed into a fat-based ointment and rubbed onto thin skin or mucous membranes, it enters the bloodstream and crosses the blood-brain barrier. Anticholinergic delirium produces a consistent sensation of flying or floating. Modern emergency room reports confirm this: patients poisoned by anticholinergic plants describe the same experience today.
Delivery matters here. The most efficient route for a transdermal ointment is through mucous membranes. A greased staff or broomstick provides the mechanism. Records from the 1324 trial of Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny mention “a pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped.” That quote, however, comes from Holinshed’s 16th-century retelling. The original trial documents do not contain it.
The flying ointment connects belladonna to henbane and mandrake. Three plants from the same family, all containing the same class of alkaloids. People who used any of them reported the same experience.
Beautiful Eyes
The species name traces to a specific practice in Renaissance Italy. Venetian women dropped belladonna juice into their eyes to dilate their pupils and appear more attractive. Mattioli described the practice in his 1544 commentary on Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, the first known written record.
The effect is real and measurable. Eckhard Hess published a study in Scientific American in 1965 (“Attitude and Pupil Size,” vol. 212, pp. 46-54) showing that men consistently rated women with dilated pupils as more attractive. The men could not say why. Evolutionary psychologists later connected the finding to arousal signaling: dilated pupils indicate sympathetic nervous system activation, which the brain reads as interest.
Some of Hess’s broader claims about pupil dilation did not replicate. A 2021 replication study by de Winter, Petermeijer, Kooijman, and Dodou in the International Journal of Psychophysiology found mixed results for several of his hypotheses. The core finding held up.
Repeated belladonna use causes temporary vision problems, extreme light sensitivity, and systemic anticholinergic symptoms. Extended use risks permanent damage. Venetian women who relied on it were poisoning themselves to be looked at.
From Goethe’s Cat to the Nerve Agent Kit
In 1819, a young pharmacy apprentice named Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge demonstrated an unusual experiment for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Runge had previously splashed belladonna extract in his own eye by accident and noticed the pupil dilation. He repeated the effect on a cat. Goethe watched, was impressed, and handed Runge a bag of coffee beans with a suggestion to analyze their chemistry.
Runge did. He isolated caffeine and published the results in 1820. The chain is direct: belladonna in an eye, a cat, a gift of coffee beans, caffeine.
Twelve years later, Heinrich F.G. Mein isolated pure crystalline atropine from belladonna (1831). Some credit Vauquelin with detecting the compound as early as 1809, but Mein achieved the first pure isolation. Precise dosing became possible. Clinical use followed.
Paracelsus had said it three centuries earlier: the dose makes the poison. Belladonna proved the point in the most literal way. At one concentration, atropine kills. At another, it treats.
Ordenstein, a student of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, introduced belladonna alkaloids for Parkinson’s disease in 1867. Hyoscyamine reduced the tremors. Charcot continued the work through 1881. For nearly a century, belladonna derivatives remained the only treatment for Parkinson’s. They helped with the tremors. They also caused dry mouth, blurred vision, confusion, and urinary retention, because blocking acetylcholine to stop a tremor means blocking it everywhere else too.
Atropine became the standard pupil-dilating agent in ophthalmology throughout the 19th century. Its effect lasts seven to fourteen days. Routine eye exams now use tropicamide instead, which wears off faster. The longer duration remains useful when sustained dilation is needed for treatment. Current research has found a second ophthalmic application: low-dose atropine (0.01-0.05%) slows myopia progression in children. China approved 0.01% for pediatric myopia in 2024. A $25 million NIH study on the same application is underway.
The most dramatic modern use is military. Atropine is the primary antidote for organophosphate and nerve agent poisoning. Sarin, VX, and similar compounds flood the nervous system by blocking the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine. Atropine counteracts this by blocking the receptors directly. Soldiers carry ATNAA autoinjectors loaded with atropine and pralidoxime.
Scopolamine found its own modern career. The FDA approved transdermal scopolamine patches (Transderm Scop) in December 1979 for motion sickness. The patches reduce symptoms by 60 to 80 percent. The same compound that medieval women absorbed through their skin and reported as flight now keeps passengers steady on ships.
Atropine sits on the WHO List of Essential Medicines as an ophthalmic mydriatic, an antidote for organophosphate poisoning, and a preoperative medication.
The Family
Belladonna’s family, the Solanaceae, contains some of the deadliest plants in European tradition: belladonna, henbane, mandrake, and thorn apple (Datura). The same family also includes the tomato, the potato, the eggplant, the chili pepper, and tobacco.
Europeans feared tomatoes for over two hundred years because of this kinship. Mattioli classified the tomato as a nightshade variant in 1544, and the reputation stuck. An accidental reinforcement made things worse: wealthy Europeans ate from lead-pewter plates, and the acid in tomatoes leached lead from the pewter. The resulting lead poisoning was blamed on the fruit itself.
One animal has solved the belladonna problem entirely. Rabbits carry an enzyme called atropinesterase that breaks down tropane alkaloids. The trait was first documented in 1852 and is heritable. Rabbits eat belladonna without consequence. They are, as far as we know, the only common European mammal that can.
Ten Dead Babies
Belladonna is widely used in homeopathy. In standard homeopathic dilutions, the original compound is diluted until no measurable trace remains. The theory holds that the “memory” of the substance persists in the water. Regulators have generally left homeopathic products alone on the grounds that, at standard dilutions, they contain no measurable active ingredient.
Hyland’s Teething Tablets became the exception.
In 2010, the FDA issued a warning about Hyland’s homeopathic teething tablets, which listed belladonna as an ingredient. Hyland’s recalled the product, reformulated, and put it back on shelves. In 2016, the FDA reported ten infant deaths and over four hundred adverse events associated with the tablets. In January 2017, FDA testing showed that belladonna levels in the tablets were inconsistent. Some tablets contained concentrations far above what the label indicated. The product was supposed to be diluted to insignificance. Some tablets had enough atropine to affect a baby.
Hyland’s issued a nationwide recall in April 2017.
The testing revealed a manufacturing problem. The tablets were supposed to contain nothing. Some of them did. Ten infants died in the gap between the label and the product.
Two Names
Linnaeus could have called it anything. He chose Atropa belladonna: death in the genus, desire in the species. A plant that kills children with sweet berries also slows childhood blindness. Atropine kills at one dose. At another, it counteracts nerve gas. An ointment that medieval women believed carried them to sabbaths is now a patch that prevents seasickness.
The berries are still out there, shiny and black on calcareous slopes from England to Iran. They ripen every autumn. They taste sweet.
