I’m working on two different projects at the moment, one about poison, the other about colonial America, so I’ve been reading a lot about tobacco.By the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Jamestown colonists figured out how to grow… 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
Candidates for the civil service during the Han Dynasty had to take an exam. To be sure they didn’t cheat, they were required to choose their questions by firing an arrow at the question paper and then answering the question nearest to the arrow hole.