by Garneta on Thu Jan 24, 2008 5:12 pm
One year I had a by-day calendar of stupidest things ever said. I saved this page, and it's up on my refrigerator:
On Eating Tomatoes, Extreme Dangers of:
Dr. James van Meeter, speaking in 1830 to a crowd in Salem, Massachusetts, about Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, who was going to publicly eat a tomato
The foolish colonel will foam and froth at the mouth and double over with appendicitis. All that oxalic acid, in one dose, and you're dead. If the Wolf Peach [tomato] is too ripe and warmed by the sun, he'll be exposing himself to brain fever. Should he, by some unlikely chance, survive, I must warn him that the skin...will stick to his stomach and cause cancer.