A Plague of Poison

A Plague of Poison
Author: Maureen Ash
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2009-03-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101024607

New in the ?terrific?( NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR JAYNE ANN KRENTZ) Templar Knight mystery series. When a cake kills a squire, the castle governor enlists the help of Templar Bascot de Marins. But as murder spreads beyond the castle walls, he wonders if it is in fact the work of a lethal master of poisons.

Poisons of the Past

Poisons of the Past
Author: Mary Allerton Kilbourne Matossian
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1989-01-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780300051216

Did food poisoning cause the Black Plague, the Salem witch-hunts, and other significant events in human history? In this pathbreaking book, historian Mary Kilbourne Matossian argues that epidemics, sporadic outbursts of bizarre behavior, and low fertility and high death rates from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries may have been caused by food poisoning from microfungi in bread, the staple food in Europe and America during this period. "A bold book with a stimulating thesis. Matossian's claims for the role of food poisoning will need to be incorporated into any satisfactory account of past demographic trends."--John Walter, Nature "Matossian's work is innovative and original, modest and reasoned, and opens a door on our general human past that historians have not only ignored, but often did not even know existed."--William Richardson, Environmental History Review "This work demonstrates an impressive variety of cross-national sources. Its broad sweep also reveals the importance of the history of agriculture and food and strengthens the view that the shift from the consumption of mold-poisoned rye bread to the potato significantly contributed to an improvement in the mental and physical health of Europeans and Americans."--Naomi Rogers, Journal of American History "This work is a true botanical-historical tour de force."--Rudolf Schmid, Journal of the International Association of Plant Taxonomy "Intriguing and lucid."--William K. Beatty, Journal of the American Medical Association

The Poison Trials

The Poison Trials
Author: Alisha Rankin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2021-01-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 022674499X

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.

Poison, Medicine, and Disease in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Poison, Medicine, and Disease in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Author: Frederick W Gibbs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2018-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317079329

This book presents a uniquely broad and pioneering history of premodern toxicology by exploring how late medieval and early modern (c. 1200–1600) physicians discussed the relationship between poison, medicine, and disease. Drawing from a wide range of medical and natural philosophical texts—with an emphasis on treatises that focused on poison, pharmacotherapeutics, plague, and the nature of disease—this study brings to light premodern physicians' debates about the potential existence, nature, and properties of a category of substance theoretically harmful to the human body in even the smallest amount. Focusing on the category of poison (venenum) rather than on specific drugs reframes and remixes the standard histories of toxicology, pharmacology, and etiology, as well as shows how these aspects of medicine (although not yet formalized as independent disciplines) interacted with and shaped one another. Physicians argued, for instance, about what properties might distinguish poison from other substances, how poison injured the human body, the nature of poisonous bodies, and the role of poison in spreading, and to some extent defining, disease. The way physicians debated these questions shows that poison was far from an obvious and uncontested category of substance, and their effort to understand it sheds new light on the relationship between natural philosophy and medicine in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Poisons

Poisons
Author: Peter Macinnis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2011-05-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1628721189

Poisons permeate our world. They are in the environment, the workplace, the home. They are in food, our favorite whiskey, medicine, and well water. They have been used to cure diseases as well as incapacitate and kill. They smooth wrinkles, block pain, stimulate and enhance athletic ability. In this entertaining and fact-filled book, science writer Peter Macinnis considers poisons in all their aspects. He recounts stories of the celebrated poisoners in history and literature, from Nero to Thomas Wainewright, and from the death of Socrates to Hamlet and Peter Pan. From cyanide to strychnine, from Botox to ricin and Sarin gas—have you ever wondered about their sources? Where do they come from? How do you detect something that can kill you in a matter of seconds? Macinnis methodically analyzes the science of these killing agents and their uses in medicine, cosmetics, war, and terrorism. With wit and precision, he weighs these questions and many more: Was Lincoln’s volatility caused by mercury poisoning? Was Jack the Ripper an arsenic eater? Can wallpaper kill? For anyone who has ever wondered and been afraid to ask, here is a rich miscellany for your secret questions about toxins.

Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680

Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680
Author: Andrew Wear
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2000-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521558273

This is a major synthesis of the knowledge and practice of early modern English medicine in its social and cultural contexts. The book vividly maps out some central areas: remedies (and how they were made credible), notions of disease, advice on preventive medicine and on healthy living, and how surgeons worked upon the body and their understanding of what they were doing. The structures of practice and knowledge examined in the first part of the book came to be challenged in the later seventeenth century, when the 'new science' began to overturn the foundation of established knowledge. However, as the second part of the book shows, traditional medical practice was so well entrenched in English culture that much of it continued into the eighteenth century. Various changes did however occur, which set the agenda for later medical treatment and which are discussed in the final chapter.

The Poison Path Grimoire

The Poison Path Grimoire
Author: Coby Michael
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2024-11-05
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 164411996X

• Shares a detailed formulary, including rituals, magical correspondences, and recipes for working with the baneful herbs of occult herbalism • Looks at the plants of fate and the divination practices they support, love magic with poison plants, shadow work and spell work, the devil’s garden, and the use of nightshades as power plants for medicine and magic • Explores poison history, lore, occult toxicology, and the alchemical power of working with poison Examining the art and science of working with noxious and malefic plants and fungi, Coby Michael discusses the occult properties of poison and how poison plants can be used in spell work and other magical operations. He looks at the plants of Fate and the divination practices they support, love magic with poison plants, shadow work, the devil’s garden, and the use of nightshades as power plants for medicine and magic. Presenting a detailed formulary, he shares rituals, magical correspondences, and recipes for working with specific poison plant allies and other baneful herbs of occult herbalism. Exploring the path of dark herbalism, the author explains how it encompasses not only veneficium—poisonous plants and fungi—but all plants that humanity has tried to forget, from “invasive” plants and those we can’t domesticate to those that have been regulated arbitrarily or simply feared as “toxic” or “poison.” He shows how the dark herbalist seeks out plants that are adversarial or taboo because the qualities we consider “dark” are really the plant’s spiritual medicine and can offer powerful wisdom and healing. Examining poison history, lore, and occult toxicology, he explains how the aim of using these plants is not to cause physical death, but rather death of the ego. He shows how “poison” in this sense is an alchemical force that allows the practitioner to become a vessel for the forbidden fruit of knowledge and how the transmutation of our personal poisons can lead to powerful self-transformation.

The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600

The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600
Author: Andrew Colin Gow
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2021-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 900447806X

This book is the history of an imaginary people — the Red Jews — in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval popular exegesis and literature, and appeared in a hitherto-unnoticed series of sixteenth-century pamphlets, in which they functioned as the medieval 'spectacles' through which contemporaries viewed such events as Turkish advances in the Near and Middle East. The Red Jews disappear from the sources after 1600, and consequently never found their way into historical scholarship.