Two categories of fungus poisoning may be distinguished: (1) mycetism, the result of eating poisonous fungi mistaken for the edible variety (which has a long history and a worldwide incidence), and (2) mycotoxicoses, the result of inadvertent ingestion of food containing toxins produced by fungi. The latter, although also of worldwide incidence, has (with the exception of ergotism) been generally recognized only during the twentieth century.

Mycetism

Calamities tend to impress, and the first reference to fungi in the Greek classics is an epigram by Euripides writing about 450 B.C. He was commemorating the death of a woman and her two children, in one day, after eating poisonous fungi. During Roman times, edible fungi were a delicacy, and diverse advice regarding them was offered by several authors such as Horace, Celsus, Dioscorides, Galen, and Pliny. The advice consisted of how to avoid poisonous species, how to render poisonous forms harmless, and how to treat fungus poisoning.

Much of this ancient folklore on precautions to ensure edibility was compiled by the authors of the first printed herbals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and some has even survived to the present day. It is, however, invariably unreliable because the distribution of poisonous and edible species seems to be random. For example, the esteemed esculents Amanita caesarea (“Caesar’s mushroom,” a Roman favorite) and Amanita rubescens (“the blusher”) are congeneric with Amanita phalloides (“death cap”) and several related species (Amanita pantherina, Amanita verna, Amanita virosa) that have been, and still are, responsible for most fatalities from fungus poisoning in north temperate regions.