Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

6. Joyas Volardores

60 6. Joyas Volardores Let us consider creatures great and small, green and blue, vegetative and mammalian, avian and human, all shells for all sorts of hearts. Let us begin with one particular shy elegant green silent creature, the foxglove plant, Digitalis purpurea. A common plant here in the Pacific Northwest; I see it nodding at me everywhere in late summer, taller than my children, leaning meditatively over the shoulders of highways, empurpling hillsides, standing watch over the dens and burrows of foxes and ground squirrels. An invader, native to Ireland but now spread everywhere in the New and Old Worlds. Mearacan dearg in the Gaelic. Produces a wide range of flowers in shades from white to pink to lavender. Pollinated mostly by bees: bumblebees, carpenter bees, honeybees, leafcutter bees, plaster bees, digger bees, mason bees, halictid bees. First named in formal herbology in 1542 by a German botanist and doctor named Leonard Fuchs, who called it digitulus, little finger, for the thimble shape of its flowers. Popularized as medicine for the heart primarily by a riveting Shropshire lad named William Withering, whose book An Account of the Foxglove, first published for five shillings a copy and featuring a painting of the purple foxglove as frontispiece, is still in print two centuries later. Talented bagpiper and golfer was William Withering, avid botanist, bitter enemy of slavery and liquor, amateur Shakespearean actor, close friend to Erasmus Darwin and Ben Joyas Volardores 61 Franklin, interested in and respectful of folk remedy: it was during his travels through rural England visiting his patients that he heard of an old Shropshire woman who knew an herbal cure for faltering hearts, and he set himself to test the effects of foxglove distillate on more than a hundred patients, including himself. “I prefer the leaves,” he wrote in 1785. “These should be gathered after the flowering stem has shot up, and about the time that the blossoms are coming forth. The leaf-stalk and mid-rib of the leaves should be rejected, and the remaining part should be dried, either in the sunshine, or on a tin pan or pewter dish before a fire. If well dried, they readily rub down to a beautiful green powder. I give to adults from one to three grains of this powder twice a day ... it has a power over the motion of the heart, to a degree yet unobserved in any other medicine, and this power may be converted to salutary ends.” * Because every part of mearacan dearg contains the glycosides digitoxin, gitoxin, and digoxin, distillates of foxglove were used as laxatives for centuries before Billy Withering realized its salutary ends; but because each of those glycosides is poisonous in large doses, many of the people given heroic doses of distillate of foxglove for their bowel troubles promptly died. The meticulousWithering listed the parade of symptoms in patients overdosed with foxglove powder: “vomiting, giddiness, confused vision, objects appearing green or yellow; increased secretion of urine, with frequent motions to part with it, and sometimes inability to retain it; slow pulse, even as slow as 35 in a minute, cold sweats, syncope, death.” Which is why Withering prescribed tiny doses to his patients. Nearly a century later a German doctor named Traube arrived at an accurate measurement of effect: digitalis in doses smaller than the wet engine 62 two milligrams stimulates the heart muscle beneficially, but doses larger than two milligrams stimulates it too strenuously, to the point where paralysis often results. In other words: a little poison is good for the heart. * My son Liam takes a little foxglove poison in the morning and a little at night. He takes a whole tablet of digoxin with his bowl of cereal and a half a tablet with his bowl of rice. It used to be that I would just put the pills on the table by his place in the morning but sometimes they would get swept to the floor by the flutter of the sports section, or they would wobble away crazily to hide under the fruit bowl, or they would be lost or mislaid or thrown in fury at taunting sister or brother, so my wife found a tiny wooden box for the pills, which protects them against loss or flinging, and also serves to remind her and me and Liam whether or not he has taken his pills, because when it comes to his medicine...