I’m lying here being sick while @seraph76 reads me bits of a history of French royal court poisonings and I think we need another terror
The revolution was an archaeological nightmare because they dumped all the fancy bones into a ditch in Saint-Denis
But one of the king’s mistresses drank gold tinctures every day and when they found her bones a bunch of heavy metals had leached into the soil from them
Melancholic individuals should drink milk hot from the udder and drop molten gold or silver into their wine, apparently
book is ‘The Royal Art of Poison’ by Eleanor Herman
the physician Paracelsus’ full name is a Final Fantasy character
‘Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim’
Paracelsus is inventing the treatment of poison and making fun of other doctors because ‘all they do is stare at piss’ and they’re ‘in league with apothecaries’
The Spanish royal family’s physicians would put their collection of holy reliquaries in bed with the gravely ill, so you’d just be lying next to some saint’s skeleton
The poor have better healthcare than the rich because they’re using lemon and garlic and herbs and the rich are using molten gold and ground-up saints
‘treated haemorrhoids with a concoction of mercury, myrrh and rose oil’
‘ox dung, mixed with radishes, white wine, strawberry juice, lemon juice, sugar and honey’ for kidney stones
to cure constipation, a doctor in 1585 recommended feeding a puppy a pound of mercury, waiting for the puppy to shit it out, then boiling and drinking it
Lewis and Clark’s campsites are traceable today because they ate mostly beef, got horrendous constipation, took mercury laxative pills called ‘Thunderclappers’, and the mercury stayed in the soil
the fancy state of the art in early modern laxatives was the ‘perpetual pill’, a ball of mercury and antimony that would be fished out of the bowl, washed off and re-used for generations
‘Paré considered the treatment to be working when the patient spat and drooled excessively, two symptoms of mercury poisoning he considered to be the body draining evil humours’
‘A more aggressive treatment was the place the patient in a heated tent to inhale fumes of arsenic, mercury, antimony and lead, mixed with turpentine and aloe’
This immediately caused brain damage, near total destruction of the teeth and jaw, and an incredibly foul smell
One dude underwent that as treatment for syphilis eleven times
This one Italian court jeweller gets syphilis and does not want to take mercury. Eventually he goes syphilis-crazy and his friends decide to kill him with poison, and they settle on a mercury salt
He does not die, but his syphilis symptoms disappear and he lives for another 40 years
‘wine sweetened with lead, a common practice’
‘recommended those suffering haemorrhoids stroke them with the amputated hand of a dead man’
your barber-surgeon would usually get paid twice off your operation because he’d sell off the blood you lost for making medicines
at the time of his death George III’s hair had over 300 times a normal level of arsenic in it
partly from medicine and partly because everyone wore wigs and all the wigs were just doused in arsenic
we are now onto the chapter on environmental health, or why palaces make you sick
unless you had a moat your latrines usually just emptied into a basement, which is only cleaned when it reaches head height or leaks
she quotes Samuel Pepys:
‘When going down into my Cellar, I stepped into a Great Heap of Turds, by which I found that Mr Turners House of Office is Full and comes into My Cellar, Which Do Trouble Me.’
‘When going down into my Cellar, I stepped into a Great Heap of Turds, by which I found that Mr Turners House of Office is Full and comes into My Cellar, Which Do Trouble Me.’
theatres were even worse. boxes had a chamber pot. once in Paris two noblewomen emptied theirs over the audience to get rid of the smell, who then chased them out of the theatre
as late as 1675 people were complaining that the grand staircase in the Louvre was just covered in human shit
people just kind of pissed or shit wherever. the only thing anyone could really do was try to prevent it was to put up crosses, which people just pissed or shit on anyway
Catherine de Braganza wrote home from Versailles about how she could barely walk into a room without seeing some guy’s prick
‘it is impossible to leave one’s apartment without seeing someone pissing’
the problem for people living there isn’t the actual piss or shit but the smell, since everyone thinks disease is caused by miasmae
hence this mania for ‘cleaner air’ where the entire court moves around between palaces, ideally while the previous one is cleaned
the piss is useful though because it’s basically the only way to launder clothes
also nobody bathes or changes clothes
English diplomats are astonished by Turks washing their hands after pissing
the Tsar’s ambassador to Versailles writes that Louis XIV ‘stinks like a wild animal’
at the coronation of Henry IV of England, when the Archbishop anointed his forehead lice rushed out of his hair
Every Medici child born in the 16th century suffered from rickets, largely because they were kept out of the light
beginning to understand why every Muslim of the time writes about Europeans as shit-covered orcs
cesspits, plague pits and cemeteries all regularly burst through to infect wells or fill basements with rotting bodies
to construct the Paris catacombs over six million bodies had to be reinterred
basically everyone who attempted alchemy died of mercury poisoning, including Charles II
anyway all of this is just scene-setting for the main event: POISONINGS
this background is intended to show us that it was insanely easy to die of things in medieval and early modern Europe, and to poison yourself with no outside help
that said a king do be known to die of poison
Henry VII of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Emperor, no less, gets got in 1313 for being the idiot who tries to actually do emperor stuff instead of just living in a shit-covered palace
tfw somebody spikes your communion wine 
except we actually know it wasn’t the wine. he got anthrax from an infected cow or horse, and was ‘treated’ with large doses of arsenic
so shift that one out of the ‘poisoned by enemies’ column and into the ‘poisoned by doctors’ column
Agnes de Sorrel - bone mercury content: 100,000x safe level. I think we can call this one as not being an accident
Prior to this was an Italian dude who did not have a lot of arsenic but whose doctor was (knowingly, murderously) feeding him digitalis
Poisoned by enemies (doctors)
circling back a bit, because people keep responding to this one
https://twitter.com/aliceavizandum/status/1081678782887612416?s=21
Spanish authorities’ method of poop control was to put up a big standing crucifix with a sign reading ‘do not defecate where there are crosses’
The poet Francisco de Quevedo vandalised one with a sign reading ‘do not put up crosses where I shit’
The poet Francisco de Quevedo vandalised one with a sign reading ‘do not put up crosses where I shit’
He looked like this, if you’re curious
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