Read by Matilda Longbottom

TThere’s a long history of helpful medicinals from plants.

Just for starters, we’ve got aspirin from willow bark, digitalis from foxgloves, quinine from the cinchona tree; and codeine from opium poppies—even, arguably, penicillin from Penicilliium mold, that blue stuff that grows on the forgotten bread at the bottom of the bin. Strictly speaking, according to science, mold is a fungus, which is neither a plant nor an animal. But I still hold that it’s sort of plant-ish.

Not all plant-based remedies pack the punch of penicillin and codeine.

Licorice, for example, comes from the root of Glycyrrhiza glabra, a relative of peas and beans. Its use dates back four-thousand years when—at least in China—it was said to rejuvenate aging men. It didn’t; neither, as some suggested, did it reverse or prevent hair loss. It’s quite nice, on the other hand, as candy in licorice Twizzlers.

Tobacco, before the Surgeon General moved in on it, was thought to cure everything from ringworm to tetanus and tuberculosis; and in the 1880s, according to a cannily anonymous article in The Lancet, tobacco was distributed to residents of a workhouse in the belief that it would protect them from smallpox. There’s no available after-action report, but I think we can all guess what happened next.

And then—perhaps the most overrated plant in the history of medicine—there’s sassafras.

Word of sassafras—that is, Sassafras albidum, a deciduous tree native to eastern North America—reached Europe in the late 1500s under the aegis of Sir Francis Drake, who brought a load of it home along with a lot of discouraged colonists who had given up on Virginia. It was hailed as a wonder drug, apparently because, as a relative of cinnamon and camphor, it smelled wonderful, which was a medicinal plus in the 16th century. In its heyday, it was used to treat everything from scurvy to syphilis. A ship with a sassafras hull was said to be safe from shipwrecks; a bed built of sassafras reportedly could never be afflicted with bedbugs. Thoughtful plantation owners, with an eye to combatting vermin, built slave cabins with sassafras floors. When sassafras eventually proved to do none of these things, it went the way of all commercial bubbles, though it still survives as filé powder—made from dried sassafras leaves and used as a spice to flavor Cajun gumbo.

Which brings me to tomatoes. Which nowadays we … just eat.

Not so in the 1830s, when Dr. John Cook Bennett of Ohio began touting tomatoes as a substitute for calomel. Calomel—chemically, mercurous chloride—was a potent cathartic, popular in the 19th century for treating a wide range of diseases, but with a host of awful side effects due to mercury poisoning. (Among these were loosened teeth, which may be why George Washington—heavily dosed with calomel as a cure for smallpox—eventually lost all of his.) Cook followed up with a list of tomato recipes—variously for fried tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato ketchup, and tomato pickles—and some hints for growing tomatoes which, he insisted, should never be trained on poles, but left as God or Nature intended, lying on the ground.

By 1937, Archibald Miles of Cleveland claimed to have extracted the crucial remedial ingredient from the wonder-drug tomatoes and to have packaged it in pills. These were dubbed Dr. Miles’ Compound Extract of Tomato and sold in boxes with an engraved portrait of Dr. Miles on the cover. The pills came in two colors—white and yellow—and various combinations and quantities of these, according to the included instructions, could cure—among others—the common cold, indigestion, rheumatism, pleurisy, liver complaints, syphilis, and scrofula.

Due to an aggressive advertising campaign, Dr. Miles’ Compound Extract spread rapidly across the country. In New York, however, it ran up against a competitor in the form of Dr. Phelps’ Compound Tomato Pills, which not only supposedly could cure everything the Extract could, but were cheaper.

The result was a war of rival tomato pills, waged via opposing testimonials in newspapers, rumor-mongering, slander, and name-calling. Miles claimed that Phelps was a quack and a charlatan; besides, he said, the Phelps pills didn’t even contain tomato. Phelps accused Miles of being “unjust and unmanly,” and with no more claim to the title of doctor than his horse. A chemist, siding with Phelps, analyzed Miles’ pills and found them to consist largely of aloe, pepper, and rhubarb. Miles called him a liar.

The controversy ceased abruptly in 1839. According to tomato historian Andrew Smith, no one knows just why; perhaps the combatants simply ran out of epithets or steam. Both eventually got out of the tomato pill business: Miles became a real-estate agent; Phelps founded the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company and died a millionaire.

The tomato pill legacy, at least briefly, continued. By the 1840s nearly every American drugstore was stocked with tomato pills, tomato tinctures, and tomato panaceas—but by the end of the decade, the fad had essentially blown over, as it became clear that tomato nostrums didn’t cure much of anything. Tomato pills, unmasked, went the way of sassafras.

On the other hand, in a backhanded sort of way, tomato pills ultimately did more good than harm. They caused a cutback in the use of calomel, which meant that fewer people were swallowing mercury, which led to an uptick in the quality of public health. And they led a boom in garden tomatoes.

Once the tomato gained a reputation as a health food, the public started planting it, to the point where the 1830s are sometimes referred to as a period of “tomato mania.” Tomatoes popped up in cookbooks, seed catalogs, newspapers, magazines, and agricultural journals. Tomatoes, once viewed—at least in the Northeast—with suspicion, were suddenly all the rage.

They still are. Today tomatoes are the second-most popular vegetable in America. (Top dog is the potato.) According to the USDA, we each eat a tad over 30 pounds of them each year.

We now know that they’re hardly miracle drugs, though—to be fair—they are reasonable sources of vitamins A and C. But that’s not why we eat them.

Nowadays we just eat them because they taste good.

I’d call that a happy ending. ❖