Poisoners do their deadly work in secret. The evidence in poisoning cases is nearly always circumstantial. In this case it is more direct than usual. You must remember that poisoning is always concealed and deliberate. It is a crime that is not done in a moment of passion, or on an impulse. It is a crime that must be planned.
Justice William Windeyer, Central Criminal Court, Sydney,
summing up in the Dean case, April 6, 1895
On one level, poisoners are takers of lives; on another level, poisons cleverly applied should be the key to the major breakthroughs of medicine in the twenty-first century, just as they were in the twentieth. The poisoners of today generally act for the benefit of humanity, but we tend to ignore them as we concentrate on a small minority, the poison murderers.
Poisoning, done with deliberation against a fellow human, is planned, secret, and dramatic, and this makes it memorable. We recall the Cleopatra of legend who died with an asp clasped to her breast; we forget the thousands who had to die in battle to show her that it was time to bring on the serpent. We recall the Borgias, who poisoned a few foes, and forget the many others of their era who relied on stiletto-, rapier-, or cudgel-wielding thugs to kill as many or more.
We recall and celebrate Mithridates, who made himself proof against poisoning by taking increasing doses, but what do we know of or care about those who sought to protect themselves by wearing armor? We remember Socrates, who was put to death by being made to drink hemlock, even as we forget many others who met the headsman, guillotine, garrotte, firing squad, or hangman.
Let us not forget that, in a world where men are generally larger and more belligerent than women and better able to handle weapons, poison was a weapon women could use just as well, and a weapon the weak could use against the strong. But best of all, poison left no bleeding, gaping holes if you selected the dose thoughtfully. In his plays, Shakespeare’s characters had poison in their ears, their food, a chalice, a potion, or on the blade of a weapon. Whatever the method, the big plus was and is the way poison levels the playing field; moreover, used carefully, poison offers the poisoner every chance of escaping retribution. This makes poison something for men to fear; and psychologists say the things we fear are often found in the most popular children’s tales, like the poisoned apple of Snow White and the evil drug of Captain Hook, who sets out to poison Peter Pan:
Lest he should be taken alive, Hook always carried about his person a dreadful drug, blended by himself of all the death-dealing rings that had come into his possession. These he had boiled down into a yellow liquid quite unknown to science, which was probably the most virulent poison in existence.
Five drops of this he now added to Peter’s cup.
James Barrie, Peter Pan, 1911
Then there are the folk tales, now on the Internet but which have been circulating for many years, of poison rings used by white slavers to drug young girls, envenomed needles dripping HIV, ATM envelopes and stamps treated with deadly poisons, and poisoned candies dropped by German zeppelins over Britain and France in World War I. Poison is everywhere in our imagination; it is also everywhere in the real world. We are generally unaware of the real poisons that surround us, and, given our reactions to the fictional ones, that is probably just as well.
Alice considers the bottle marked “Drink me.”
Poisons are everywhere, if you look hard enough, and we can now blame evolution for this. If you are an animal, and something with pointy teeth and bad breath comes slurping and salivating in your direction, you run away. If you are a plant and some lumbering beast starts to bite chunks out of you, your best defense is to poison it.
Evolution shapes poisons in curious ways. For example, there is the problem of seed dispersal, where plants need animals to eat their fruits, pass the seeds through, and drop them somewhere else, in a small damp patch of dung—instant mulch, moisture, and nutrition for the sprouting seeds. Animals with grinding teeth may crush the seeds, so there is a delicate balance between encouraging animals to eat and sending them on their way, as we can see in the Capsicum family.
Capsaicin is unpleasant stuff: police use it to subdue the unruly, in the form of pepper sprays, but it turns out that capsaicin repels or poisons mammals but not birds. In a 2001 study, researchers found that peppers in the field were unpalatable to cactus mice and pack rats, but the curve-billed thrasher devoured them with impunity. The bird was the most effective at spreading the seeds without harming them, the researchers found.
Marijuana, Cannabis indica, makes its active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), to discourage cattle from eating it, because they, unlike humans, do not like being stoned, though the Scythians did, according to Herodotus:
On a framework of three sticks, meeting at the top, they stretch pieces of woolen cloth, taking care to get the joins as perfect as they can, and inside this little tent they put a dish with red-hot stones in it. Then they take some hemp seed, creep into the tent, and throw the seed onto the hot stones. At once it begins to smoke, giving off a vapor unsurpassed by any vapor-bath one could find in Greece. The Scythians enjoy it so much that they howl with pleasure. This is their substitute for an ordinary bath in water, which they never use.
Herodotus, Histories, c. 430 BC
But if cattle fear intoxication, some animals actually depend on getting high. Australian koalas need very little water, because they take most of it from their food. They sit in Australian gum trees, looking cuddly, but in reality they are just spaced out on eucalyptus oil, out of their tiny little minds on the toxins lurking in the leaves of the gum tree—and their minds have to be tiny. Brains are major energy users and koalas simply cannot afford to use lots of energy, because that would mean eating more leaves, which would poison them even more.
Move to a new place, and a whole new range of poisons is available to you; safety lies in having a bit of local knowledge. This was known even in biblical times, when Elisha visited Gilgal:
. . . and there was a dearth in the land; and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him: and he said unto his servant, Set on the great pot, and seethe pottage for the sons of the prophets.
And one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds his lap full, and came and shred them into the pot of pottage: for they knew them not.
So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof.
But he said, then bring meal. And he cast it into the pot; and he said, Pour out for the people, that they may eat. And there was no harm in the pot.
It is widely agreed that the poison in this case was in the fruits of a local vine, highly regarded in small doses for its medicinal properties, and called either colocynth, bitter apple, or Citrullus colocynthis (L.) Schrad., if you happen to be a botanist. As long as you know how to deal with it, however, it does not matter much what you call it.
Human nature being what it is, as soon as the harmful properties of an object—be it animal, vegetable, or mineral—were established, people found ways to use it for nefarious purposes. Xenophon, for example, comments on Persia that
Children in former times were taught the properties of plants in order to use the wholesome and avoid the harmful; but now they seem to learn it for the mere sake of doing harm: at any rate, there is no country where deaths from poison are so common.
Xenophon, Cyropedia, 360 BC
Citrullus colocynthis
One of the more attention-getting poisons over the years has been arsenic, and we get the word from the Greek “arsenikon,” which was the name the Greeks gave to orpiment, a yellow arsenic sulfide pigment, but the word stretches back into Syriac, Middle Persian, and Old Iranian. Everybody, it seems, liked orpiment, in part because its gold color reminded hopeful alchemists and others of gold. Indeed, the word orpiment is itself a corruption of the Latin auripigmentum, or gold pigment, reflecting its main non-medical use in decoration and art.
Livy records the first Roman judicial trial for poisoning as far back as 329 BC, and Suetonius, the Roman historian who told it like it was, claims one Gnaeus Domitius, the great- great- greatgrandfather of Nero, tried in 80 BC to commit suicide by taking poison. Having second thoughts, he quickly demanded an emetic and vomited the poison up. The physician who supplied the poison was one of his slaves, and knew his master well enough to have given him only a mild dose, so Gnaeus Domitius granted him his freedom as a reward.
At that stage, the Romans had hardly begun to poison. By Ovid’s time (he died in AD 17), everybody was hard at it, and the poet wrote of how men lived on plunder, much of it won by poisoning. Guest was not safe from host, he said, nor father-in-law from son-in-law. Even among brothers it was rare to find affection, while husbands longed for the deaths of their wives, who reciprocated, and murderous stepmothers brewed deadly concoctions, and “sons inquired into their fathers’ years before the time.”
Locusta was a lady of Gaul who gravitated to Rome, where she plied her trade as purveyor of fine poisons to the selected nobility. Occasionally her trade extended to consultation, and, for the squeamish and inexperienced, Locusta would even administer her poisons to selected targets, including some in the imperial family.
Suetonius names her as the source of the arsenic Nero used on Britannicus, the son of Claudius. Locusta provided too mild a dose, and Nero flogged her. Locusta protested that the weak dose was to make the death less obvious, but Nero, saying he was not frightened of the Julian law against poisoning, demanded a stronger dose, which he tried first on a kid, but it was still too slow.
After further boiling down, he tried it on a pig. When the pig dropped dead on the spot, he gave the rest to Britannicus the same night and rewarded Locusta with her freedom, though she had already been condemned to death as a poisoner. He later sent students to her. In the end, Locusta was killed by Galba when he became emperor.
Deliberate poisoners aside, the amount of lead the Romans ingested on a daily basis would have made them poisoned and venomous. The lead was in the water and their wine, along with many natural poisons. Few of these natural poisons, however, tasted as sweet as lead acetate, often called sugar of lead, or sapa by the Romans, who added it to wine to improve the flavor—but it certainly made no improvement on them or their dispositions.
Lead acetate is uncommon in its sweetness, and one of the most obvious questions must be why so many poisons have a bitter taste. The answer probably has to do with the way so many venomous animals are brightly colored, to warn their predators off. “Don’t start anything, don’t tread on me,” they say, and for the most part it saves them from having to defend themselves. Plants, on the other hand, can afford to lose a bit of their mass, and a taste with the same “Don’t start anything” message is as good as a color warning, but a bad-tasting poison sends an even blunter message. A bad taste works against herbivores of all sizes and visual acuities, and faster than any poison, but poison provides permanent relief from those who won’t take a hint.
This association of poison with a bitter taste is probably lucky for those of us who might otherwise fall prey to the wiles of the poisoners, who are driven to rely instead on the smaller number of almost tasteless poisons, often of a mineral origin. Even here, there is a sort of evolutionary process, with poisoners like Dr. Lamson (whom we will meet later) seeking out the undetectable poisons, and the good guys working as fast as they can to close off any loophole by finding ways to detect the subtle new poisons.
We evolved in poisonous surroundings, all of us—the humans, the beasts of the field, the birds, the fish, even the plants. Life probably evolved first at something like a hydrothermal vent, deep in the ocean. Scientists already know of 3.2-billion-year-old fossils at former vent sites, and unfriendly as it seems, a dark place with scalding water, noxious metals, and savage gases is probably the cradle of all life as we know it today. That makes us poison’s children indeed.
We are also the descendants of a later gang of active poisoners, whose venom wiped a planet almost clean of all previous life forms. These mass murderers were aerobic life forms that evolved and started spewing a poison into the planet’s atmosphere. This was oxygen, the gas produced when photosynthesis splits water as part of a process that hitches a free ride on sunlight, using it for food.
The brutally toxic oxygen was sopped up at first by other elements on the planet’s surface, producing huge deposits of iron oxide, but, in the end, those sinks for the oxygen were all used up and still the oxygen kept coming, poisoning most of the anaerobic life forms. A few of them clung on and are still there, lurking in odd places and causing gangrene and tetanus when the conditions are right to let them get their own back. Others, like Bacteroides gingivalis, live in obscure places such as the tiny, oxygen-poor gaps between our teeth, until they are rudely thrust forth from their tenuous shelter into the poisonous oxygen by a thoughtless toothpick or a casual floss.
There are other anaerobic bacteria, like the gas gangrene bacterium, Clostridium perfringens, which produces toxins to kill flesh to make more living space for itself, and the related Clostridium botulinum, a major cause of lethal food poisoning in foods like canned meat and sausages (botulus being the Latin for “small sausage”). Botulinum toxin, or Botox to the fashion-conscious, is generally rated as the most powerful poison around, and we will meet up with it again later. Whichever way you look at it, we need not have too much sympathy for the anaerobes, because they are our enemies, just as we are theirs.
Biologists are still arguing about some of the effects of early oxygen production. These days we believe that oxygen was something of a double-edged sword, clearing a way for our kind of aerobic life but causing some fearful problems for new life forms as well. Of course, it all happened so long ago that we are reduced to searching for hints to find clues to fuel inferences to feed hypotheses. It is all a bit tenuous.
On the other hand, we “modern humans” may have been directly shaped by an interaction with poisons. Around 1.8 million years ago, give or take a bit, something acted to change the line of curious bipedal apes that became us, and that something may have been poison.
In today’s hunter-gatherer societies, meat is a chancy thing that provides a feast if the male hunters are lucky, while the female gatherers’ daily food collection ensures survival.
Without straying too far, our female ancestors and their young could bring in regular basic food like tubers and small animals, but many tubers are poisonous. If early members of Homo were able to use fire, the secret to their survival may have lain in tubers that could now be disarmed by cooking. This would provide better daily nutrition for growing apelings who were changing into humanlings, as they were guarded by both parents, acting as partners.
Whether we were founded, shaped, sculpted, and formed by poison or not, there is a fascination with poisons that draws scientists and medical practitioners to them, either to use them or to study them, because in poison there is a hidden and secret power. The poisoner may be a figure of fear and evil, but the poisoner is the one who has the power of life and death—and this power is impossible to argue with.
How can we mere humans hope to compete with poisoners like our very remote ancestors? Perhaps we can’t, but over time, we have done fairly well, as Pliny noted almost two millennia ago:
. . . we rest not contented with natural poisons, but betake ourselves to many mixtures and compositions artificial, made even with our own hands. But what say you to this? Are not men themselves mere poisons by nature? For these slanderers and backbiters in the world, what do they else but launch poison out of their black tongues, like hideous serpents?
Pliny, The Natural History, c. AD 70
Pliny was asphyxiated by Mount Vesuvius’s volcanic gases in AD 79, and he was probably lucky to have made it that far without being poisoned by a rival, a ruler, or a relative. When you look back over the past few hundred years, however, not much has changed. The amazing thing is not the amount of poison around, it is that we manage to avoid most of these poisons. We have found ways to treat cassava and cycad seeds, to avoid the fish that will be bad for us, while at the same time identifying those poisons that might in small doses be good for something helpful, rather than harmful.
When rats encounter a novel food, they nibble a small amount, and if they feel ill effects, they do not try that food again. That is easy enough to explain as a response, but how do you account for people learning to treat poisonous food by soaking it, drying it, and soaking it again? Humans are able to communicate what they learn, which is important, but you have to wonder how many died before we discovered how to beat the poisons that had evolved to stop us eating so many potential foods.
We humans are lucky that a few inquisitive spirits can perform the tests and share their knowledge with many. William Buckland, nineteenth-century geologist and divine, and one of science’s true eccentrics, took risks, but they were curiosity-driven rather than motivated by a love of humanity. Buckland pursued exotic foods to such an extent that he boasted about having eaten his way through much of the animal kingdom. According to the English writer Augustus Hare, there was even a moment of anthropophagy, or perhaps regophagy:
Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French king preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, “I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,” and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.
Buckland, like some of the medical researchers we will meet later, was prepared to risk poisoning himself, but there were many, some of whom we shall meet now, who preferred to poison others.
