King of Poisons

The Arsenic Files: Part 1

Murder and intrigue

History is dotted with stories of rulers and influential families making use of poison to dispatch their enemies and rivals. There is some truth in keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Close enough to pour them wine tainted with any number of poisons, the most notorious of which was arsenic. Emperor Nero famously poisoned his own brother with arsenic in order to keep a tight grip upon his own rule.

The Borgias were a leading family from Aragon, Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries during the Italian Renaissance. They attracted the ire of a number of influential families, including the Medicis, because of their quest for influence and power. They supposedly used a poisonous white powder called Cantarella, which could be sprinkled on food or stirred in to wine. The existence of this named substance is disputed, with little evidence of it in historical records. It reportedly had a slightly sweet, pleasant taste, though Arsenic is odourless. It was thought to be blended with toxins from bacterial decay of rotting carcasses. They also used strychnine and other poisons.

Socrates, the ancient Grecian philospher born in 470BC, was found guilty of corrupting the minds of young Athenians by rejecting Greek Religion and finding that humans have an ‘inner voice’. It is claimed by some that Socrates drank arsenic as his preferred method of dispatch, however, other sources claim the poison was hemlock. Hemlock causes muscular paralysis and eventually respiratory failure and death, when administered in tiny amounts. Whilst both poisons deliver a fatal dose at around 100-300mg, hemlock kills in around 3 hours and arsenic can take anywhere from two hours to four days. An undesirably long and painful death.

Arsenic as a household poison - Image getanswers dot ru

As Alfred Swaine Taylor said “A poison in a small dose is a medicine and a medicine in a large dose is a poison”. Much apothecary practice during these centuries applied what we now know to be toxic substances, in small amounts to remedy ills. Therefore the presence of them in a household or palace was not deemed to be necessarily nefarious. Today arsenic trioxide is used for the treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia, a subtype of acute myeloid leukemia (we will come to that later). The side effects of this drug, administered intravenously, are listed here. By all accounts it is a particularly unpleasant treatment.