In another case of modern versus older definitions, my household suddenly finds itself questioning historical writings whenever they mention a herb being poisonous. This is due to a little historical digging my daughter was doing around buckbrush/snowball/wild snowball. Going into several old books that she has on her phone, she found an entry where someone had supposedly suffered the worst case of poisoning they'd seen from a herb, even beating out rhus poisoning. This was from a book written in the early 1900's.
However, the word poison had been used to describe not just Rhus or sumac, but also rhubarb leaf AND the reaction this person had to buckbrush. . . . these conflicts of understanding and behaviour seem to centre around the person being able to ingest as much as they want without side effects of any kind. This isn't true of domestically sold foods, so why would it be true of garden or wild-grown foods?
To call a bad allergic reaction a poisoning, that puts a very erroneous spin on things that has coloured our modern understandings of some plants, because we assumed that the word "poison" meant in the past what it means today.
In our house, we like to learn from history, spitting out the bones whenever necessary. It appears we've found a potentially problematic bone, and will be paying closer attention as to whether the ancients described poisoning or allergy/sensitivity instead. This kind of erroneous labelling may be what happened to the rhubarb leaf.
https://naturalhealthgodsway.ca/2026/09/30/rant-poison-i-dont-think-that-word-means-what-they-thought-it-meant/In another case of modern versus older definitions, my household suddenly finds itself questioning historical writings whenever they mention a herb being poisonous. This is due to a little historical digging my daughter was doing around buckbrush/snowball/wild snowball. Going into several old books that she has on her phone, she found an entry where someone had supposedly suffered the worst case of poisoning they'd seen from a herb, even beating out rhus poisoning. This was from a book written in the early 1900's.
However, the word poison had been used to describe not just Rhus or sumac, but also rhubarb leaf AND the reaction this person had to buckbrush. . . . these conflicts of understanding and behaviour seem to centre around the person being able to ingest as much as they want without side effects of any kind. This isn't true of domestically sold foods, so why would it be true of garden or wild-grown foods?
To call a bad allergic reaction a poisoning, that puts a very erroneous spin on things that has coloured our modern understandings of some plants, because we assumed that the word "poison" meant in the past what it means today.
In our house, we like to learn from history, spitting out the bones whenever necessary. It appears we've found a potentially problematic bone, and will be paying closer attention as to whether the ancients described poisoning or allergy/sensitivity instead. This kind of erroneous labelling may be what happened to the rhubarb leaf.
https://naturalhealthgodsway.ca/2026/09/30/rant-poison-i-dont-think-that-word-means-what-they-thought-it-meant/
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