September 13th, 2012Top StoryThe Deadliest Poisons in History (And Why People Stopped Using Them)By Esther Inglis-Arkell
Sometimes when we look around our lives we can't help but think - this situation would be greatly improved with the use of a little poison. After all, can every last one of the Borgias be wrong? Modern day people are not the first to come around to this way of thinking. Greeks and Romans: Hemlock and Aconite
Aconite comes from the plant monkshood. It, reportedly, also has a famous casualty. The emperor Claudius was said to have been poisoned by his wife by aconite in a plate of mushrooms. The wife part of that scenario seems to be an anomaly since aconite was known as "The Mother-In-Law's Poison." It first caused vomiting and diarrhea, and then caused arrhythmic heart function until the person died. Hemlock and aconite were a great favorite of the Greeks and the Romans. They didn't just poison each other with the direct version of hemlock, but tried to do each other in with the meat of larks, which were said to eat so much hemlock that their flesh was poisonous. Why did they favor these plants so much? Well, it was also given by doctors to ease swelling and calm seizures or muscle spasms. Aconite was a treatment for head colds by doctors - right up until the 20th century. As meticulous as poisoners seem, they often use whatever comes to hand when they need to kill someone. Since they could get hold of both of these poisons and have a seemingly innocent reason for using them, they were ideal. They fell out of favor often because they weren't nearby. Over time, the effects of the poison became known. Occasional throw-back poisoners tried to use them, but as one unlucky Victorian poisoner who had gotten his entire education from a classics textbook found out, medical science moves forward. His "undetectable aconite," was well-known as a poison. Being a poisoner is very much about staying ahead of the curve. Medieval Peasants: Belladonna and Mandrake Belladonna gets its name because it's said that peasant women used to rub it in their eyes. It's a paralytic, and would take out the muscles used to constrict their pupils. When they put it on their cheeks it would cause their faces to flush with what looked like blush. They believed that this gave them a dreamy look that was sexy to men. Probably it just tipped the men off that these women knew how to get their hands on some belladonna. Some say that this was the actual poison used on Claudius by his wife. Others say that Macbeth poisoned an entire invading army with it. One of its most famous uses was as a hallucinogenic that witches used on themselves to give them the feeling of flying. When too much was used - and too much can mean a single leaf - people get nauseous, hallucinate, then develop a rapid pulse that trickles down to nothing.
Mandrake and belladonna were, again, commonly used by certain people during a certain time period because they had them close by and no one would blame them for being in possession of them. As the population moved to the city, it became less common to harvest mandrake or inconspicuously maintain a ten foot high belladonna bush. Besides, as industrialization came on, well, there were new opportunities. (For those of you wondering about digitalis - foxglove - it is surprisingly hard to give someone a lethal dose of it. Modern poisonings are generally only serious when the victim is a young child. It's also time-consuming to distill, which makes a poisoning with it hard to pull off when a family shares a kitchen.) Ladies and Gentlemen of Industry: Strychnine, Cyanide, and Arsenic Cyanide is everywhere. It's in the foods we eat. It's in the chemicals around us. Although substances that contained cyanide were used well back in history, it wasn't until 1782, when a Swedish chemist named Scheele distilled hydrogen cyanide, that things really got swinging. It was first used in distinctive blue paints, but once it was discovered that cyanide killed people quickly - and generally painlessly - that it was used by the military to poison people on both sides. Spies famously used cyanide capsules to kill themselves quickly if caught. It brings on unconsciousness first, followed by convulsions, the inability to absorb oxygen, and death. This was the poison that killed (or didn't kill!) Rasputin. Its quickness and effectiveness at first worked it its favor, but soon people caught on. Lizzie Borden might have been convicted if it had been widely known that she had been asking at chemist after chemist for "prussic acid" - another name for hydrogen cyanide - just days before her parents were axed to death. The testimony of the chemists was thrown out of court on a technicality and she was found not guilty. The reason she couldn't get it was, even in an era in which people could buy heroin over-the-counter, it had been involved in too many poisonings. Sadly, it is still used sometimes by the kind of people who don't care if everyone knows their victim has been poisoned.
Arsenic is, in the end, the be-all and end-all of historic poisons. Without a doubt it had the longest run. Technically, it should be back there among the Romans, because it was used even in antiquity. It was called the King of Poisons, and was the favorite of the Borgias. But it wasn't until the Victorian era when it got its queen. Or rather, queens. Though it was said to have Napoleon and a good chunk of the Italian clergy, this eventually became the lady's poison. Women used arsenic, which constricts the veins, to do the opposite of what medieval women did with belladonna. They wanted a white-as-snow, composed face. Girls learned about the properties and dangers of arsenic in school from their friends, and they were very used to carrying it around and dissolving it in liquids to bathe their faces in. It was tasteless, colorless, and odorless. A few grains of the stuff could kill a man. And a few grains did kill many, many men. (Women, to be fair, weren't the only ones to do this. It's been said that an overly harsh arctic exploration leader, Charles Francis Hall, was poisoned by his own men using arsenic.)
Belladonna Image: Rillke Via Mental Floss, UCL, Belladonnakillz, Mason, PLOS, Dartmouth. |
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