You know those drops they put into your eyes at the eye doctor, the ones that dilate your pupils? The dilating stuff is called atropine sulfate, and it’s extracted from the Atropa belladonna plant (known as deadly nightshade). I don’t know about you, but I hate the sensation it causes. My eyes water like crazy when I go out in the sun, and I can’t read for hours afterwards.
But many Italian women of the Renaissance willingly used a derivative of the belladonna plant as eye drops to dilate their pupils, believing it made them more attractive.
Atropa belladonna is a flowering plant that grows all over Europe. The foliage and berries are very toxic, containing tropane alkaloids that have long been used as poisons. Before he became king of Scotland, Macbeth, who died in 1057 (yes, the one Shakespeare wrote a play about), was said to have used it to poison an army of invading Danish troops.
The subject of the class was about size and shape, and the relationship of surface to volume. All animals, from a tiny gnat to a giant seismosaurus, are shaped to their advantage by natural selection. They assume sizes and shapes that allow them to adapt best to their environment, and they are ruled by gravitational forces. If an animal grew larger but kept the same shape, there would be a decrease in relative surface area, because volume grows more rapidly than does surface area.
That’s why a fifty-foot woman is impossible, at least proportioned the way she is in the movie. She’d have to have massive legs to support her increased volume. And it’s why so many of my favorite sci-fi films about killer bugs that grow to be the size of a school bus are–spoiler alert!–impossible. The reason huge animals like whales can exist is that they live in a nearly weightless water environment. On land, smaller animals must remain small because if they grew larger, their volume would increase more rapidly than would their surface area, and their legs would not be able to support their weight without thickening considerably (think of the legs of an elephant or a rhino).
The large insects in these films could never walk up walls or fly. As Gould points out, “…the ability to fly depends upon the surface area of the wings, while the weight that must be borne aloft increases as the cube of length.”
The Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759 – 1796) gave us a word that rhymes with purple. Sadly, children’s picture book writers probably can’t use it in their rhyming books about colors, because the word “curple” means “butt.” Here’s the stanza Burns wrote in a letter to a fellow poet (which I found in Molly Oldfield’s book, 
The artist Benvenuto Cellini (1500 – 1571) was a goldsmith and musician, and also one of the greatest sculptors of the Renaissance. He seems also to have been kind of a thug. He killed quite a lot of people, first “legitimately” fighting off soldiers of Charles III during his siege of Rome in 1527, but also after that, in what appear to have been bar fights and street brawls. Suffice to say, he made a lot of enemies.
Some enemies of Cellini invited him to dinner and sprinkled his food with mercuric chloride, a favorite poison of the era. He developed severe gastrointestinal symptoms, including vomiting and diarrhea, but he eventually recovered. And his syphilis was also cured. His poisoners had intended to kill him, but healed him instead.
Recently I visited the Poison exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It included a toxicological explication of the witches’ poem in MacBeth, which, by happy coincidence, my son is reading in English class right now (he’s loving every word of the play, should his teacher be reading this).
Here’s an excerpt from the poem (Act IV, Scene I):
Max von Pettenkofer (1818 – 1901) was a highly influential German chemist and pioneer of modern hygiene during the 1860s and 70s. According to