Psilocybin administration

It seems certain that the first description of intoxication by Liberty Caps (Psilocybe semilanceata) – or as they are popularly known today, ‘magic mushrooms’ – was provided by Brande (1800). In October 1799, Mr Everard Brande was summoned to the house of a family stricken with unusual, diverse symptoms. The father, ‘JS’, had gone to Green Park, London, to gather field mushrooms, which he cooked in a saucepan along with some flour, water, and salt. This mixture was consumed by ‘JS’, his wife and four children. An hour later ‘JS’ developed vertigo and black spots before his eyes, while the rest of the family – with one exception – experienced stomach cramps and cold hands and feet. However, eight-year-old Edward ‘… was attacked with fits of immoderate laughter’. Brande administered emetics and ‘fortifying tonics’ which mediated the family's recovery several hours later.

Brande (1800) was keen to bring these ‘… deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric, not hitherto suspected to be poisonous’ to a wide audience. But a more literary contribution brought to a still wider audience the hallucinatory effects of Liberty Caps in the context of narcotic-inspired Victorian folklore: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). In a recent edition of the book (Carroll, 1965), John Tenniel depicts a hookah-puffing caterpillar perched on a mushroom while he addresses Alice ‘. in a languid, sleepy voice.’ Heaving himself off the mushroom the laid-back larva advises Alice to nibble the mushroom he's just been sitting on: ‘One side will make you grow taller; the other side will make you grow shorter.’