Love Potion
If you are one of the many hapless people this Valentine’s Day who is alone, painfully aware of the desperate solitude that permeates your life and the nauseating cuteness with which couples mawkishly coo over each other, you may be thinking to yourself that science should start concerning itself less with curing diseases and understanding the universe and instead start tackling the hard-hitting issues like making you more desirable and getting you some sweet lovin’. Fantasizing over the prospect of a panacea for the ailments of love, I found myself emboldened by anecdotal evidence regarding a love potion made by Dr. Rue and her group of Searchers (oddly, not researchers). I decided to investigate the existence of said love potion in the scientific literature by inputting love potion(s) into PubMed.
I knew something was fishy about the existence of the love potion when my search returned only ten results, none of which originated from the work group of Dr. Rue. Furthermore, three of those articles were in German and, no disrespect to the Germans, but not since Goethe have the Germans really been considered experts in love, and even then Goethe’s leading men were either completely despairing or assisted by the devil in pursuit of their affairs. Besides, how titillating is it to have someone lean in close and whisper “Ich liebe Dich” in your ear? Spittle in the ear canal is so not sexy.
Although I was no closer to finding an elixir with which to get women to fall madly in love with me, I did find a couple articles that reported on ideas so abhorrently anti-feminist that they would make women fall decidedly out of love with me. The more disturbing of these addressed a sexual custom in Zimbabwe known as “dry sex” in which women employ traditional agents, such as leaves, rocks, or baboon urine, and less traditional agents like Vick’s vapor rub and Colgate toothpaste to dry out their natural lubrication and make for an orifice that is tighter and warmer and, according to some, more “virgin-like.” Though I cannot fathom how this is at all a pleasurable experience for anyone involved, it seemed beneficial for the women sampled who tended to be commercial sex workers. The point of the article was to investigate what effect this practice has on condom usage, and though there was opposition certainly from the johns, many of the sex workers expressed genuine concern over losing the “love potion effect” that results from the introduction of a barrier (which sadly underscores the rampant HIV epidemic and the disappointing gender inequity of the country).
The other article goes into a brief history of the role of women in the context of love sickness and love potions. This was used more or less as a springboard into examining how the history of the medical discipline has unfairly associated women with dirtiness and toxicity. Most telling is the concluding sentence in which the author speculates on how medicine reinforces the tired stereotype responsible for the etymological link between the root of the words “Venenum” and “Venus.” I found it both ironic and unsettling that a scientific inquiry into the creation of a love potion could yield such anti-feminist results.
One author wrote about love potions in a slightly more tangible way, giving credence to the prospect of anticholinergic agents being used as love potions. This article presented a fascinating foray into the nightshade alkaloids and the exploitation of their soporific, analgesic, and hallucinatory effects. On the one hand the mandrake members of the nightshades were considered a demon weed, spawned by the semen from criminals hung at the gallows and shrieking devilishly when uprooted (Shakespeare often referred to the screams of the mandrakes). The pleasurable effects of the nightshades were also exploited, and their most sinister association was in the witches’ brew, in which women who wanted to fornicate with the devil would coat their bodies with the “witches’ ointment,” climb into the kneading trough, and do unmentionable things with broomsticks (which makes me consider the etymology of the witches’ brooms in a whole new light). Similarly fascinating, so-called belladonna was used by women in Venice to dilate their pupils and make themselves look more fetching because of their large and deep eyes at the expense of their vision. All in all, this was one of the more fascinating articles, tainted only by the fact that the author published the exact same paper in German in a completely separate journal.
On a more poetic note, several articles addressed the story of Tristan and Isolde, a legend of forbidden romance between two lovers who, according to some accounts, had consumed a love potion that left as a side effect a long-lasting passion. It’s quite a touching story and, under the cunning hands of scientific authors, has lost all of its emotional panache. One author focused all of his energies discounting the efficacy and existence of a love potion in Wagner’s operatic rendition of the story and suggested a fallacy in attributing the symptoms to anticholinergic agents. The second article, inappropriately entitled “Love Potion Number 8 ½. Gamma-hydroxybutyrate poisoning,” also talks about a love potion in the context of Tristan and Isolde, but then goes off on a rant about what GHB is and how its usage as a street drug and body-building agent defies understanding. The article is entertaining for its logical inconsistency however: the author not only fails to tie in the Tristan and Isolde story in any meaningful way, but he also interjects a curious anecdote about his prime motivation for joining the Navy – so he wouldn’t have to eat liver. What exactly Tristan and Isolde have to do with liver is beyond my comprehension, but by recounting their deaths, he does seem to insinuate that users of GHB are stupid and deserve to die.
Certainly there are other suspected “love agents” being researched, such as MDMA, phenylethylamine, and various pheromones, but I’d say I learned very little about love potions per se. I instead picked up many interesting tidbits that, if nothing else, give me something to talk about at a party. And isn’t the development of a charming and witty personality really the most potent love potion? So thank you, PubMed. Thank you for reinvigorating my love life. And that is the last time I think I will ever have occasion to write that.
References
Aronson J. 2003. Signs of love, not a love potion. BMJ 327(7429): 1471-2.
PubMeditation
PubMed is the search engine of choice for most scientists and doctors, and is the reason why science libraries are usually empty these days. With archives of abstracts that go back decades and links to full journal article PDF files, PubMed is the gateway to science history, the tool for inflating your reference list, or making the painful discovery that your experiment has already been done. For this recurring column, we exploit its power for fun and mischief.