Witches, potions, and metabolites: an overview from a medicinal perspective

Abstract

Witches were popularly imagined as older women (above middle age), with large warty noses, whose clothes were shabby and used pointy hats. They are usually associated with a cauldron and the presence of a black cat that accompany them in this imagery projection. The fact is that, historically, many women have suffered countless physical and emotional acts of violence, for which different analysis can be made from the perspective of the Human Sciences. Of the historical narratives that deal with this violence, the Salem witch trials stand out as the biggest witch hunt in history, where a series of hearings and trials of people accused of witchcraft took place in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1693 and May of 1694, episodes in which more than two hundred people were accused of practices of heresy. However, it is necessary to recognize that many of these women considered witches were, in fact, profound connoisseurs of plant species with biological properties, even though there was not precise information about the active compounds of these plants. With the development of characterization techniques for organic compounds, like spectrometric and spectroscopic analyses, most of the metabolites present in the “potions” had their structures elucidated, allowing a more appropriate knowledge of the possible metabolic pathways. In this article, we report a study of the structure–activity relationships for two of the most famous potions in history: the sleep potion and the love potion, with the aim of presenting new discussions within the scope of medicinal chemistry that can contribute to the process of science diffusion.