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Pick Your Poison
From deadly snakes to toxic mushrooms, a look at history's poison
garden.
The hemlock plant, which contains a potent alkaloid, that causes
convulsions, paralysis and death—was a favored method of execution in
ancient Greece. The most famous victim of hemlock executive is the
philosopher Socrates, who died in 399 B.C.
So many people believed that the sudden death of U.S. President Zachary
Taylor on July 9, 1850 was due to arsenic poisoning that his body was
finally exhumed from a Louisville, Ky., cemetery in 1991. The analysis
found low levels of arsenic, but not enough to be considered lethal.
Most now consider the actual cause to be food-poisoning.
Egyptian queen Cleopatra II famously committed suicide in the year 30
B.C. by letting an asp (a member of the exceptionally poisonous pit
viper family of snakes) bite her on the arm.
The most dangerous mushroom known is the Death Cap mushroom (Amanita
phalloides). It is responsible for most accidental mushroom poisonings
and suspected as the agent in a number of historical assassination,
including the death of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV.
The great Hollywood scandal of 1920 involved the poison death of screen
star Olive Thomas, who died Sept. 20 after accidentally—or so it was
reported—drinking the bichloride of mercury used to treat her husband
Jack Pickford's syphilis.
The sedative Phenobarbital, first marketed in 1912, has a dark history
of high profile suicides and murders, among them the solved murder of
New York City socialite Starr Faithfull and the 1996 suicide of Margaux
Hemingway.
Agatha Christie's debut novel "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," first
published in 1920, involved homicidal use of the poison strychnine.
In 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a poisonous snake could be
considered a "deadly weapon" after a Montana man threatened two police
officers with his Rhinoceros Viper |
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