Category:Fungi

When a man's frozen body was recovered from a melting glacier high in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, having lain there since about 3300 BCE, the Iceman was found to have carried with him pieces of two fungi. One, a tinder fungus, served for carrying fire. The other, the birch polypore (Fomitopsis betulina), is neither food nor tinder, and the explanation most widely accepted for its presence is medicinal: the birch polypore is purgative and acts against intestinal parasites, and the Iceman is known to have carried a whipworm infection.^[1] On that reading it is among the oldest direct evidence of a person carrying a medicine, and the medicine is a fungus.

Fungi have been medicine, and poison, and intoxicant, for as long as the human record reaches. The fly agaric, the scarlet mushroom of folklore, is among the most ancient of the intoxicating fungi, and has been proposed as the soma of the Vedic hymns.[citation needed] The psilocybin mushrooms were known to the peoples of Mesoamerica as teonanácatl, the flesh of the gods. The ergot fungus, growing on rye, poisoned medieval Europe in recurring epidemics of ergotism, the burning affliction known as Saint Anthony's fire, and was later turned to use in obstetrics. The antibiotic penicillin, the foundation of the modern antibiotic era, was drawn from a fungus of the genus Penicillium, isolated after Alexander Fleming observed in 1928 that a mold had killed the bacteria growing around it.^[2] In the medical traditions of East Asia, tonic fungi such as reishi and lion's mane have been used as medicines for many centuries.[citation needed]

This category, Category:Fungi, is a kingdom-level category. It collects the wiki's medicine pages whose subject is a fungus, or a medicine drawn from one. Fungi are not plants; they are a kingdom of life in their own right. The wiki nonetheless files them, by pharmacological lineage rather than by biological taxonomy, within the Plant-origin root, and Category:Fungi sits beneath Plants as the marker of the fungal medicines within it.

Fungi were classified as plants through most of the history of biology, grouped with them because they are rooted, still, and grow from the ground. Modern biology places them in a kingdom of their own, the kingdom Fungi; the molecular evidence shows this kingdom shares a more recent common ancestor with the animals than with the plants. Fungi do not photosynthesize; like animals, they live by consuming organic matter already made. Their chemistry is their own, and the medicines and poisons they yield, the psilocybin of the Psilocybe mushrooms, the muscimol and ibotenic acid of the fly agaric, the ergot alkaloids, the penicillins, belong to no plant.

The wiki's origin scheme, set out at Category:Plants, sorts every medicine into one of two roots, plant or pharmaceutical. The plant root is, more exactly, the natural-origin root: it collects the medicines whose active material is a natural product of a living thing and which entered use through tradition, whether that living thing is a plant, a fungus, or an animal. Category:Fungi does not alter that scheme. It is a kingdom tag, not an origin tag. A fungal medicine page carries its single origin tag, Plants, and carries Category:Fungi in addition, marking which kingdom of the natural-origin world the medicine came from.

This category collects the wiki's fungal medicine pages. At present they are the medicines of two intoxicating mushrooms, together with the compounds drawn from them:

• Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, with its active compounds muscimol and ibotenic acid.
• Psilocybin mushrooms, with psilocybin, the tryptamine they produce.

The wider medicinal-fungi estate, the tonic mushrooms of East Asian medicine (reishi, lion's mane, cordyceps, turkey tail) and the ergot fungus, is not yet built out on the wiki. As those pages are written they will be indexed here.

A medicine page carries Category:Fungi when its subject is a fungus, or a medicine whose source is a fungus. The tag is applied directly to each such page; it is not inherited through the category tree.

Category:Fungi is additive. It sits alongside, and never instead of, a page's origin tag: every fungal medicine page on the wiki carries Plants as its origin tag and Category:Fungi as its kingdom tag, with no conflict, because origin and kingdom are different things. Because the category sits within the natural-origin root and drives a variant of the wiki's plants skin, it marks the fungal medicines of that root. A fungal-derived medicine that reached use through scientific discovery rather than tradition, such as a manufactured antibiotic, belongs to the Pharmaceutical root and is not marked here.

A page that carries Category:Fungi is rendered in the wiki's fungi skin, a variant of the plants skin developed for the fungal medicines. The skin resolver reads the Category:Fungi tag directly from each page, which is why the tag is applied to the page itself rather than reached through the category tree.

This is one of the wiki's MedCategory overview pages; it carries the MedCategory marker tag. It sits beneath Plants, within the wiki's natural-origin root.