Köhler’s fly agaric plate shows Amanita muscaria, the red-capped fly agaric, and Amanita caesarea, Caesar’s mushroom. It’s plate 7 in volume 4 of Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, a German book of medicinal plants. This second supplement was edited by the botanist Gustav Schellenberg and Wilhelm Brandt and completed in 1914, 35 years after Hermann Köhler died. The plate was printed in color.
What the plate shows
The fly agaric, marked A, is shown young and grown. B is Caesar’s mushroom. Small drawings show the young fly agaric growing inside a white skin that later tears into the flakes on its cap, plus its spores and part of a gill cut across.
The key says the main figures follow Walter Migula and the growth stages follow Hermann Hoffmann, 2 botanists whose books the entry cites.
The names
The book calls it Amanita muscaria (L.) Pers. The L. stands for Linnaeus, who named it Agaricus muscarius in 1753, and Pers. for Persoon, who the book says renamed it Amanita muscaria. Today’s rules credit Lamarck, who did that first, in 1783.
Muscaria comes from the Latin musca, fly. “Fly agaric” is thought to come from its use as a fly killer in milk. Agaric goes back to the Greek agarikon, a tree fungus Dioscorides wrote about. Amanita was an ancient Greek name for a kind of mushroom, used by Galen.
Caesar’s mushroom
Scopoli described it in 1772, and Persoon renamed it to Amanita in 1801. Its names, including the German Kaiserling (from Kaiser, emperor), honor the Roman emperors, who are said to have prized it.
It has an orange cap, yellow gills and a white cup at the base, and is a prized food in southern Europe. Rain can wash the white flakes off a fly agaric, and people have eaten one by mistake for Caesar’s mushroom.
The fly agaric as poison and medicine
In 1869, Schmiedeberg and Koppe isolated muscarine from the fly agaric. It was the first poison isolated from a mushroom. The book already noted that muscarine alone couldn’t explain the poisoning. The main poisons, ibotenic acid and muscimol, were found in the 1960s. The fly agaric is poisonous, but deaths are very rare.
The book adds that it was once used against epilepsy and cramps.
The Amanita Muscaria Mushroom in our collection
The Amanita Muscaria mushroom in our botanical art collection is a replica of this plate, finished by hand in our workshop.
