One of the commentators on the works of the ancient Greek writers, says,
“Among the Greeks, women appear to have been most addicted to criminal
poisoning, as we learn from various passages in ancient authors.” The
author most frequently quoted is Antiphon, whose discourses on judicial
procedure in Athens in criminal prosecutions, which appeared about four
hundred and thirty or forty years B. C., are still preserved. Dr.
Witthaus, the toxicologist, in repeating this observation, supplements
it with an assumption which may or may not be warrantable. He says,
“Women appear to have been most addicted to the crime of poisoning in
the Grecian period, _as they are at the present time_.” A repetition may
also be noted in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, under the term
_Veneficium_, the crime of poisoning. Referring to its frequent mention
in Roman history, Smith says, “Women were most addicted to it.”
This crime has furnished a theme for novelists and dramatists all the
way from the Poison Maid or Bisha-Kanya of India, in the Hindu story of
the “Two Kings;” in the “Secretum Secretorum” of Aristotle (XXVII.); and
in the “Gesta Romanorum” (XI.), to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of
“Rappacini’s Daughter.” Our modern fiction writers generally select
their culprits from the male sex,—as for example, Charles Dickens in his
“Hunted Down,” and Charles Reade in “Put Yourself in His Place.”
Frequent references in Shakespeare’s dramatic works, such as the
poisoning of Regan, daughter of King Lear, by her sister Goneril, or the
removal of Leonine by Cleon’s wife in Pericles, show that this, as all
else in human character and conduct, could not escape the grasp of the
master spirit. He makes Richard II. say,—
“Let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:—
How some have been deposed, some slain in war;
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered.”
In Cymbeline, the king’s physician, in announcing the death of the
queen, surprises and startles the monarch with the revelation of her
fiendish purpose to destroy both him and his daughter by a former queen,
in order to clear the way for her ambitious projects:
“Your daughter, whom she bore in hand to love
With such integrity, she did confess
Was as a scorpion to her sight; whose life,
But that her flight prevented it, she had
Ta’n off by poison.
“More, sir, and worse, she did confess she had
For you a mortal mineral, which, being took,
Should by the minute feed on life, and lingering,
By inches waste you: In which time she purposed
By watching, weeping, tendance, kissing, to
O’ercome you with her show,” etc.
Sanskrit medical writings, which date back several hundred years before
Christ, testify that the Hindus of that early period were familiar with
poisons—animal, vegetable and mineral—together with their antidotes.
Passages like the following show that criminal poisoning was guarded
against:
“It is necessary for the practitioner to have knowledge of the symptoms
of the different poisons and their antidotes, as the enemies of the Raja
(sovereign)—bad women and ungrateful servants—sometimes mix poison with
food.”
To various warnings which follow is added the precaution, “Food which is
suspected should be first given to certain animals, and if they die, it
is to be avoided.”
There is abundant evidence that the Persians and Egyptians, as well as
the Hindus, were familiar with poisonous substances, such as the venom
of serpents, the hydrocyanic acid of the peach kernel, mineral
corrosives or irritants, and vegetable narcotics. In the Grecian
mythology there is occasional reference to the removal of inconvenient
husbands by goddesses who are familiar with the deadly properties of
aconite. The manner in which Ulysses neutralized the enchantments of
Circe, as related in the Odyssey, shows that attention was given at an
early period to the application of antidotes. Homer also tells us of the
voyage of Ulysses to Ephyra,
“to learn the direful art
To taint with deadly drugs the barbed dart;”
and Ovid relates that the arrows of Hercules were tipped with the venom
of serpents, differing in that respect from the modern South American
poison, _curare_, which is a vegetable extract. Poisoned arrows are
referred to in the sixth chapter of Job, but there is no reference
either in the Old or New Testament to the use of poison for taking away
life.
Of the poisons used in Greece in the historical period, and mentioned by
Nicander, the favorite appears to have been hemlock. Whether it was the
_Conium maculatum_, or the _Cicuta virosa_ or _aquatica_, is a matter of
controversy. Haller contends that the water-hemlock was the _conium_ of
the Greeks. It may be noted, however, that Pliny says that the generic
term _Cicuta_ was not indicative of a particular family of plants, but
of vegetable poison in general.
For the first circumstantial report of an instance of the class under
consideration, we must go back to Antiphon, who, as already noted, lived
more than twenty-three centuries ago. In one of his discourses he gives
a short speech, entitled “Against a Stepmother, on a Charge of
Poisoning.” It treats of a case which was brought before the famous
court known as Areopagos. The speaker, a young man, is the son of the
deceased. He charges his stepmother with having poisoned his father
several years before through the instrumentality of a woman who was her
dupe. The deceased and a friend, Philoneos, the woman’s lover, had been
dining together, and she was persuaded to administer a philtre to both,
in hope of recovering her lover’s affection. Both the men died, and the
woman—a slave—was put to death forthwith. The accuser now asks that the
real criminal—the true Clytemnestra of this tragedy—shall suffer
punishment.
During the Renaissance in Italy, poisoning became a fine art; the
victims were numbered by thousands, and the female fiend was everywhere
in evidence. In the seventeenth century the use of poison as an
instrument of secret murder became so common as to warrant a violation
of the confessional. In 1659 the priests of Rome informed the Pope,
Alexander VII., of the great number of poisonings revealed to them in
the confessions of young widows. Investigation led to the discovery of a
secret society of women which met at the house of Hieronyma Spara, a
fortune-teller, who dispensed an elixir or “acquetta” for the
dissolution of unhappy marriages. After a large number of victims had
been sacrificed, La Spara’s practices were detected through cunning
police artifice. She and thirteen of her companions were hanged; others
were publicly whipped half-naked through the streets of Rome, and those
of the highest rank were banished.
There was a similar society of married women in Naples headed by a
Sicilian woman named Tofana, who devised the arsenical solution known as
the Aqua Tofana, Acquetta di Napoli, or Aqua di Perugia. It was usually
labeled “Manna of St. Nicholas of Bari.” Eventually the nature of her
transactions was discovered and she was cast into prison. It is said
that she was strangled, but whatever her end, it is certain that she
confessed, under torture, to instrumentality in six hundred murders by
poison, including two popes, Pius III and Clement IV.
Murrell says that the Aqua Tofana was made by rubbing white arsenic into
pork, and collecting the liquid which drained from it during
decomposition. To an irritant mineral poison was therefore added, by
this vile process, a ptomaine or cadaveric alkaloid possessing
properties of the highest degree of toxicity. Be this as it may, there
is well-grounded belief that corrosive sublimate and opium were
sometimes added to the arsenic.
In other countries there was similar activity in this line. Thierry, the
historian of the Norman conquest, for example, tells us of one queen of
the Franks, Fridegonde, in the sixth century, whose life “could be
summarized in a chronological table of assassinations by steel or
poison”; and of another, Brunhilde, who poisoned her grandson and ten
kings or sons of kings.
In Russia, Catherine I., wife of Peter the Great, noted for her
scandalous misconduct, is believed to have poisoned her husband; and in
France, Francis II. and Charles IX. were poisoned with the connivance of
Catherine de Medici, wife of Henry II., who instigated the massacre of
St. Bartholomew, to say nothing of the prompting of the assassination of
Henry of Guise and his brother the cardinal. Catherine had in her employ
a Milanese named Reni, who served her in the double capacity of perfumer
and poisoner. Here, again, the backward swing of the iconoclastic
pendulum has challenged the verdict of history, but historic judgment is
still firm and impregnable.
In England the most noteworthy case in high life was that of the
Countess of Somerset, who poisoned Sir Thomas Overbury, in the Tower of
London, in 1613, with corrosive sublimate. As Lady Essex she had
procured a divorce from her husband in order to marry Robert Carr, Earl
of Somerset. Overbury was in possession of incriminating facts
concerning Lady Essex which would have been fatal to her success, and he
was put out of the way ten days before the decree of divorce was
pronounced. More than two years elapsed before circumstances led to the
discovery of her crime. She was found guilty, but was pardoned by James
I. This leniency was in marked contrast with the treatment of those who
had no friends at Court. A statute of Henry VIII. ordered prisoners to
be boiled to death, and in accordance therewith, it is related that a
young woman who had poisoned three families at Smithfield was boiled
alive.
In the course of the latter half of the seventeenth century a mania for
secret poisoning was developed in France, which extended to all classes
of society. La Spara and Tofana had fitting types and imitators in Paris
in two midwives and fortune-tellers named Lavoison and Lavigoreux. So
great was their traffic in poisons, and it may be said, so fashionable,
that their houses were thronged with purchasers, both of high and low
degree, from Paris and the provinces. The usual motives and incentives
were in full play, jealousy, revenge, avarice, court intrigue, political
enmity, and removal of all obstacles that stood in the way of iniquitous
plans and projects. To suppress and punish this class of offenders, a
special tribunal was established in the reign of Louis XIV., known as
the “Chambre Ardente.” Lavoison and her confederate were condemned and
executed in 1680, and their accomplices in various cities of France, to
the number of more than one hundred, were burned or beheaded.
Of the prisoners of the aristocratic class of that period, none
commanded such widespread interest, and none is so well remembered as
Marie-Marguerite d’Aubray, la Marquise de Brinvilliers. Here was a woman
with every advantage of high birth and position, of large wealth, of
influential connections, of singular beauty, fascinating manners and
elegant accomplishments, recklessly throwing all away in the attempt to
substitute a scoundrelly lover for a reprobate husband. This lover,
Gaudin de St. Croix, who, while incarcerated in the Bastille, in company
with the Italian chemist, Exili, had learned from him the preparation
and application of poisons, so far as then known, became in turn the
instructor of the marchioness. This Jezebel, in order to test the
efficacy of the materials which St. Croix supplied, and to qualify
herself for the sure destruction of her father and her two brothers, who
antagonized her shameful amour, visited the hospitals, particularly the
Hôtel Dieu, day after day, in the guise of a sister of charity, to
experiment upon helpless invalids. In the course of this diabolical work
she often produced effects as mere aggravated symptoms of the maladies
she was ostensibly endeavoring to alleviate, and while outwardly gentle,
tender, compassionate, and sympathetic, she succeeded in sending a large
number to the deadhouse without incurring suspicion. St. Croix
afterwards lost his life by inhaling deadly fumes in his laboratory;
letters compromising the marchioness were found in his cabinet, and she
escaped to Liège, but was eventually decoyed from a convent in which she
had taken refuge, and brought back to Paris, tortured into confession,
and beheaded on the scaffold in the Place de Grève. The best narrative
of her romantic career may be found in the admirable historical novel of
Albert Smith, better known as an entertaining writer than as an English
surgeon.
With respect to social position, there is a wide gulf between coarse and
vulgar reprobates and such society leaders as the Belgian aristocrat,
Madame Marie Thérèse Joniaux, whose trial at Antwerp, several years ago,
for the murder of her sister, brother, and uncle, all insured in her
favor, created a profound sensation. She was the daughter of General
Ablay, a distinguished cavalry officer; had been brought up in an
atmosphere of refinement and cultivated taste; had been twice married to
men of superior rank, and had moved among the best social circles of
Brussels and Antwerp. But down in the depths of her moral sense she
proved to be as depraved, as vicious, as impenitent as the low-born
wretches to whom we have referred. Her love of luxury and display and
her passion for cards exhausted her fortune, and her nearest relatives
were sacrificed to repair it. Yet she was so far above suspicion that it
was only the rapidity with which the claims successively matured, and
the impetuous and indecent haste with which payment was claimed, that
led to her betrayal.
A case which attracted widespread attention was that of Madeline Smith,
of Glasgow, who was tried in July, 1857, for the murder of her lover and
seducer, Pierre Emile L’Angelier. He sought to crown his perfidious
conduct with marriage, but her parents not knowing of their illicit
relations, forced an engagement to marry a man of their choice, Mr.
Minnoch. Thereupon the revengeful scoundrel exposed to friends of the
family Madeline’s piteous letters to him with reference to her
_enceinte_ condition, and drove her to desperation. The indictment read,
“administering arsenic or some other poison in coffee, cocoa, or some
other food or drink, in February, 1857.” The trial ended with the Scotch
verdict, “not proven,” to the great relief of the community, everybody
being in sympathy with the defendant. In the course of the analytical
evidence, several chemico-legal questions were involved, one of the most
important of which related to the degree of solubility of arsenic. In
the stomach of the deceased the chemists found ninety grains of arsenic
either dissolved or suspended, and there was arsenic enough in the
intestines to cause violent purging. This, by the way, was seized upon
by the defence as consistent with the theory that the deceased died of
cholera morbus. But while the crown contended that the arsenic had been
administered in coffee or chocolate, the defence claimed that it was
impossible that such a quantity could have been taken unconsciously by
the deceased in these or any other liquid media. With reference to this
view, Witthaus very properly notes that it presupposes that solution is
a requisite to secret administration, but while this may be true of a
transparent medium, and where the victim is in the possession of his
senses, it must not be forgotten that a much larger quantity than could
be dissolved may be stirred into a thick and opaque liquid, and taken
without producing any effect upon the senses, except possibly a rough
taste or gritty sensation.
No case of arsenical poisoning in recent times has attracted so much
attention, aroused so much interest, and provoked so much discussion as
that of Mrs. Florence Maybrick. The fact that James Maybrick was in the
habit of taking arsenic as a tonic in fractional doses, and the
insufficiency of such alleged motives as the life insurance, and the
attachment to Brierly, were points in favor of the defence. On the other
hand, the repeated investigation of the Home Secretary, and his stubborn
resistance to appeals for pardon from England and America, strengthened
the presumption of guilt. But even those who were unconvinced of the
prisoner’s innocence of criminal intent gladly acquiesced in the release
from long imprisonment which finally came in response to persistent
demand.