Poisons

Wherefore we were ordered to kill all the dogs and cats … I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats, few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house. All possible endeavours were used, also, to destroy the mice and rats, especially the latter, by laying ratsbane and other poisons for them, and a prodigious multitude of them were also destroyed.
— Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, Everyman edition 137.

In the course of this work, animals and plants have been drugged, poisoned, intoxicated, illuminated, kept in darkness, half smothered, painted inside and out, whirled round and round, shaken violently, vaccinated, mutilated, educated and treated with everything except affection from generation to generation.
— H. J. Muller (1890 – 1967).

Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), Dr. Watson, in The Five Orange Pips (1892), describing Sherlock Holmes.

The constancy with which the same crimes repeat themselves every year with the same frequency and provoke the same punishment in the same ratios, is one of the most curious facts… We can tell beforehand how many will stain their hands with the blood of their fellow-creatures, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners, almost as one can foretell the number of births and deaths.
— Adolphe Quetelet, 1796 – 1874), on French crime statistics.

… talk of infection being carried on by the air only, by carrying with it vast numbers of insects and invisible creatures, who enter into the body with the breath, or even at the pores with the air, and there generate or emit most acute poisons, or poisonous ova or eggs, which mingle themselves with the blood, and so infect the body …
— Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722.

When they had waited there a little while, the yeomen of the guards entered, bareheaded, clothed in scarlet, with a golden rose upon their backs, bringing in at each turn a course of twenty-four dishes, served in plate, most of it gilt; these dishes were received by a gentleman in the same order they were brought, and placed upon the table, while the lady taster gave to each of the guard a mouthful to eat of the particular dish he had brought, for fear of any poison.
— Paul Hentzner, Travels in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1599, published in English translation 1797.

On the same kind of analogy, a German doctor has introduced hemlock and other poisons, as specifics, into the materia medica.
 — Tobias Smollett Humphrey Clinker.

Poisons and medicines are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents.
 — Peter Mere Latham, General Remarks on the Practice of Medicine, ch 7.

The poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease and save the life.
 — Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, chapter 7.

But since the antiseptic treatment has been brought into full operation, and wounds and abscesses no longer poison the atmosphere with putrid exhalations, my wards, though in other respects under precisely the same circumstances as before, have completely changed their character; so that during the last nine months not a single instance of pynaemia, hospital gangrene or erysipelas has occurred in them. As there appears to be no doubt regarding the cause of this change, the importance of the fact can hardly be exaggerated.
— Joseph, Lord Lister (1827–1912), British Medical Journal.

Cases of mushroom poisoning fall into two categories:
I. Those due to fungi which contain intrinsic toxic principles.
II. Those due to fungi which contain no intrinsic toxic principles, but have undergone decomposition.
— Philip Hamill (ed.), Murrell’s Poisons, 14th edition.

Psychology is as unnecessary as directions for using poison.
— Karl Kraus (1874 – 1936).

[Hannibal] gave orders to collect the greatest possible number of venomous snakes and put them alive in earthenware jars … When the other Pergamene ships began to press their opponents too hard, on a sudden the earthenware jars of which I have spoken began to be hurled at them. At first these projectiles excited the laughter of the combatants, and they could not understand what it meant. But as soon as they saw their ships filled with snakes, terrified by the strange weapons and not knowing how to avoid them, they turned their ships about and retreated to their naval camp. Thus Hannibal overcame the arms of Pergamum by strategy.
— Cornelius Nepos (110 – 25 BCE), Hannibal, translated J. Thomas, 1995.

By the hulls of these [Cycas seeds] which we found plentifully near the Indian fires we were assurd that these people eat them, and some of our gentlemen tried to do the same, but were deterrd from a second experiment by a hearty fit of vomiting and purging which was the consequence of the first. The hogs however who were still shorter of provision than we were eat them heartily and we concluded their constitutions [were] stronger than ours, till after about a week they were all taken extreemly ill of indigestions; two died and the rest were savd with difficulty.
— Sir Joseph Banks (1744 – 1820), Journal, Vol. II, Sydney: Trustees of the Public Library of NSW, 1962, 115.

It has been completely revised and many new poisons have been added.
— Preface to the 14th edition, Murrell’s Poisons, 1934.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
— A. E. Housman (1859 – 1936), A Shropshire Lad, LXII.

Thallium acetate was first given therapeutically to terminal tuberculosis cases to suppress ‘night sweats’. We shall never know whether the tests were successful because the side-effects of the treatment were much more noticeable — the patients’ hair fell out. The future of the drug obviously lay in its depilatory action… the chief dermatologist at the St Louis Hospital in Paris introduced it in 1898 as a pre-treatment for ringworm of the scalp, and after the First World War, it was extremely popular for this purpose.
— John Emsley, ‘The trouble with thallium’, New Scientist 10 August 1978, 393-394.

You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.