In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

This volume of selected reports of the most remarkable trials for murder by poisoning, which have been held during the past half century, with essays and notes explanatory of the nature, and operation, and methods of detecting the various poisons supposed to have been employed, will it is hoped prove useful to the medical, as well as the legal profession. With this object the evidence of the medical and chemical witnesses has been given in detail, especially in those cases in which a conflict of scientific testimony arose, between experts of the highest professional character and reputation. Care has also been taken to state the scientific nomenclature of this class of witness correctly, a point on which the shorthand writers, otherwise so reliable, are naturally liable to fail, catching as they do only the sounds of a language unknown to them, in reporting which the error even in a single letter is often most important. My colleague, besides furnishing the latest information obtainable with reference to the various poisons, has offered from recent experiments, made specially for this purpose, explanations of those points in the several trials about which the rival experts disputed, bringing to bear on them the latest discoveries in chemical science. In preparing these reports, I have followed the form adopted by the late Mr. Townsend, the Recorder of Macclesfield, in his valuable volumes of trials—now I believe quite out of print—grouping the witnesses under the heads of the case to which their evidence specially applied, dividing the scientific from the moral testimony, and wherever a conflict arose between the experts called for the prosecution and those for the defence, giving the evidence of the latter immediately after that of the former, so as to place the points at issue more clearly before the reader. It would have been impossible, within reasonable limits, to have reported in detail the elaborate speeches of counsel (most of them models of argument, criticism, and eloquence), or the minute and exhaustive charges of many of the presiding judges. The abstracts which have been given will, however, serve to perpetuate the most important and notable parts of both. In some of the cases the immediate application of these either to certain points in the evidence, or to the arguments adduced on either side, has been shown by quotations in the notes. With these exceptions, and a few notes pointing out errors or discrepancies in the evidence, I have generally forborne to express an opinion on the verdict, preferring to present such reports of the evidence as may enable the student to form his own conclusions. With the progress of chemical science the field of the poisoner is constantly extending. New poisons are yearly discovered, each succeeding one apparently more difficult of detection than the former. Death lurks in many unsuspected forms, and but for the parallel march of the science of detection, the poisoner would more often escape. A grave danger to society, too, lies in the patent medicines, so popular and so perilous; in the vermin killers, loaded with deadly poison, which can be bought without let or hindrance by any one; and the use of preparations for animals—not so deleterious to the latter, as they are death-dealing—if either intentionally or by accident given to a human being. Stringent as the regulations of the Poisons Act appear on paper, the facility with which Lamson purchased aconitia, merely on the credit of his name appearing in the Medical Directory, and the really unrestricted sale of patent medicines and vermin-killers, mark the practical inutility of the Act. A new Act, dealing with these points, has been promised by the Government, but there seems little probability of its passing this session.

Thompson's history begins with mythology and primitive man and continues into the 20th century. In between we discover the many types of poisons and their origins, including hemlock, hellebore, arsenic, strychnine, and stramonium; and the many men and women who have chosen deadly elixirs for their murder weapon. Thompson recounts many of the most famous cases of poisoning including the attempts on Queen Elizabeth's life; Catherine Wilson, who carried out a series of cold-blooded murders by poison; the Crippen case; Mary Blandly, who was as beautiful as she was deadly; and countless others.

This fascinating book will be enjoyed both by those interested in the science of poisons and also by general readers who can dip in and find hair-raising horrors and calamities on every page. In this fascinating guide to poisons, Celia Kellett provides information and entertainment in equal measure as she explains clearly what all the different poisons are and how they work, giving us all the gory detail of how, by accident or design, they have led to the demise of so many people. From cyanide to the Black Widow spider, and from the Green Mamba snake to botulism, poisons can be found everywhere from the jungle to the refrigerator. Did you know, for example, that the Emperor Napoleon died from arsenic poisoning caused by the green dye used for the pattern on his wallpaper? Or that the Green Mamba’s venom is so toxic that a bite is fatal within half an hour? Or that 50,000 people die from snake bites every year in India? Poison is rarely out of the headlines, with recent stories including the murder, by polonium poisoning, of Alexander Litvinenko in London, allegedly by the KGB, The Horse Whisperer author Nicholas Evans becoming seriously ill in Scotland after eating poisonous mushrooms, and melamine poisoning in Chinese baby-milk formula. It is a subject that holds a fascination for the general public who (along with budding crime writers, and perhaps the KGB) will want to buy this excellent book in large numbers.

From 1680 to 1850, courts in the slave societies of the western Atlantic tried hundreds of free and enslaved people of African descent for poisoning others, often through sorcery. As events, poison accusations were active sites for the contestation of ideas about health, healing, and malevolent powers. Many of these cases centered on the activities of black medical practitioners. This thesis explores changes in ideas about poison through the wave of poison cases over this 170-year period and the many different people who made these changes and were bound up these cases. It analyzes over five hundred investigations and trials in Virginia, Bahia, Martinique, and the Dutch Guianas-each vastly different slave societies that varied widely in their conditions of enslaved labor, legal systems, and histories. It is these differences that make the shared patterns in the emergence, growth, and decline of poison cases, and of the relative importance of African medical practitioners within them, so intriguing. Across these four locations, there was a specific, temporally bounded, and widely shared relationship between poison, medicine, and sorcery in this period. This relationship centered on medical practitioners of African descent involved in poison cases where the affliction, cure, or both were made with sorcery. My quantitative analysis of these cases also reveals a shared cluster of cases in the mid-eighteenth century-before the age of revolutions-and a heavily male gender ratio among the accused. These findings complicate the focus historians have placed on famous cases occurring in the context of wars and highlight a significant change from contemporary European associations between poison and women. These poison cases were central to a long interaction and transformation of ideas about the causes of and solutions to illness, which were among the most formative and fundamental challenges faced by people in the Atlantic World.