The Personal Factor in Mushroom Poisoning

Abstract

It is an old saying that what is one man's meat is another man's poison. Doubtless every reader has a few acquaintances whose dietetic idiosyncrasies are matter of remark among their friends. I happen to know two persons who are made ill by eating cake or other food containing egg,-never by eating eggs themselves, because neither could be bribed to taste them willingly. Not a few have to pay the penalty of total abstinence from some delicacy for having once indulged in a surfeit of it. Possibly the majority of us have discovered some generally wholesome article of diet which it is prudence on our part to avoid. One of the theories offered to explain some of these vagaries of digestion is that many kinds of food, particularly those for which a taste has to be acquired, contain substances-call them poisons if you like-which our leucocytes have to learn to neutralize. Another theory is that in the chemical laboratory of the digestive system there are made a great variety of compounds; in exceptional cases or under exceptional circumstances, some of these may be poisonous enough to cause auto-intoxication. The imagination, too, sometimes exercises a remarkable influence upon the digestive organs. Workers in a logging camp are not apt to be squeamish. I knew of a case where one of a number of them who had just disposed very acceptably of a deep pie, on being informed of the kind of meat it contained, was immediately seized with violent mal de mer.