I stumbled across a strange, sad little anecdote the other day as I was researching something on another topic. It was a picture of a little girl in a fashionable dress, and the author casually mentioned that the child died… Read More
Yesterday I drove to Ithaca, New York, where I met up with Mary Smith, Professor of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine maintains a poisonous plants garden, which makes sense, if you think about it. Veterinary … Read More
Fans of Ernest Hemingway know that a lot of absinthe gets drunk in his novels. Absinthe was a strong alcoholic drink made from an aromatic, bitter-tasting herb called Artemisia absinthium, or wormwood. Its characteristic licorice flavor was derived from fennel… Read More
The artist Benvenuto Cellini (1500 – 1571) was a goldsmith and musician, and also one of the greatest sculptors of the Renaissance. He seems also to have been kind of a thug. He killed quite a lot of people, first… Read More
Recently I visited the Poison exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It included a toxicological explication of the witches’ poem in MacBeth, which, by happy coincidence, my son is reading in English class right now… Read More
I’m researching a new book, and have been spending a lot of time reading about the history of medicine, and various methods that were used to cure ailing patients. Sometimes the treatments did a lot more harm than good (see… Read More
The poison sarin was created by five German scientists during World War II. Its name is derived from theirs: Schrader, Ambrose, Rudiger, and van der Linde.
… Read More
In his book Il Libro dell’Arte, Cennino Cennini (1370 – 1440) cautions painters against working with the arsenic-based yellow pigment, realgar. “There is no keeping company with it . . . . look out for yourself.”
http://www.noteaccess.com/
Texts/Cennini/2.htm
James… Read More
I was in New York last week, walking along a street in Soho, when this picture on a salon door caught my eye.
No, this is not a picture of a crime scene. It’s a hollow candle, and they light… Read More
Carapichea Ipecacuanha, a flowering plant native to Brazil, was first introduced to Europe in the mid 17th century. Its roots were used as a medicine—known to many as syrup of ipecac–to make a patient vomit in the case of accidental… Read More