Sorrel Soup Scare Oxalic Acid

After a scientific lecture about a newly developed UV-meter during a chemical conference in 1995, a heated debate evolved about the toxicity of oxalic acid. For some witnesses, this debate was quite memorable for two reasons. First, neither of the sides in the debate was familiar with basic toxicology and second, the question 

In everyday life, a substance such as white arsenic, or even oxahc acid, is often deemed poisonous, or to use a more highbrow word, toxic. This statement by itself does not mean much, as the devil is in details, more specifically, in the amount of the substance. This idea has been stated by quite a number of people in a variety of ways. One of the first examples comes from Paracelsus, a scientist in the sixteenth centuiy  

All things are poison, and nothing is without poison only the dose permits something not to be poisonous. 

This can be worded in a shorter version as well The dose makes the poison. Thomas Maim, German writer in the twentieth centuiy had his own take on this in his novel The Magic Mountain Der Zauberberg)  

The truth was. in the world of matter, that all substances were the vehicle of both life and death, all of them were medicinal and all poisonous, in fact therapeutics and toxicology were one and the same, man could be cured by poison, and substances known to be the bearer of life could kill at a thrust, in a single second of time. (Translation H. T. Lowe-Porter) 

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