The mushrooms of death

​Mushroom poisoning has been in the news recently and in 1926 a possible case in Wellington was making the news.
Twenty five year old Ethel Pilkington, who had moved to Wellington from Akaroa, was found lying unconscious on the kitchen floor by the pantry door in a Severn Street house in Island Bay.
She had been staying with the family of her fiance, Arthur Preston who was awakened about 3am when she was found.
A doctor was hurriedly called who thought it was mushroom poisoning and gave her something to make her vomit but she died later that morning.
Uncertain what had killed her, an inquest was begun and she was examined by Dr P P Lynch (who we have written about before).
He was unable to find what killed her and when a witness at the inquest said she liked to eat raw mushrooms, the idea of mushroom poisoning rose again.
Lynch - who was always noted for his precise work - said he was unable to confirm that and would need to consider her stomach contents.
The inquest had to be adjourned as he went to find out.
By the time the inquest resumed several weeks later there was much more evidence. Ethel’s mother Mary Eleanor Pilkington was a widow. The pair, who only had each other, had recently moved from Christchurch to Wellington.
At the second hearing Mrs Pilkington said that earlier in the year Ethel had suffered a seizure and had since had several more. They were often like fainting spells and she was better after resting.
The doctor who had treated her then told the inquest that she was breathing heavily when found with some frothing from her mouth.
It was what Dr Lynch needed to know.
He had found nothing that indicated poisoning - and with the new evidence he was certain that she had died from asphyxia due to a seizure brought on by epilepsy.
It was not the only time mushroom poisoning made the news.
The most common poisoning comes from mistaking the poisonous death cap mushrooms for field mushrooms. But death caps are relatively recent, supposed to have come to New Zealand as spores on oak seedlings.
Native to Europe, they spread - often with humans as their method of moving - across the world, being identified in the Americas by about 1918 and one of the first mentions of them by name - a warning - in New Zealand was in 1966.
So the deaths of William Watkins in 1887 from mushrooms was a different species, as was the deaths of the three young children from the Hayes family in Mokai in 1916.
Ethel Pilkington is buried in Karori Cemetery.
Photo by Annie Spratt.