Poison

Poison traces the history of the silent assassin in chronological order. It recounts the stories of both the users and the victims of these mysterious substances, from Cleopatra, the Borgias, and Qin Shi Huang to modern secret service agents and terrorists. Profiles of the most commonly used toxins of each era show how the power-hungry, the dangerous, and the desperate have turned natural killers to their own ends.

Poisoning is a dark art as old as humanity. Roman emperors used it freely to dispose of rivals. Guests at Renaissance dinner parties could be quietly assassinated with adulterated wine, and professional poisoners supplied murderous wives with toxic tonics for their husbands. In twentieth-century warfare, poisonous substances were used in new and terrible ways to terrorize and destroy civilians and enemy forces alike. Today, in the search for the perfect covert weapon, shadowy figures deploy pernicious poisons that are almost impossible to trace.

The same substances that have been used to kill or injure have also served throughout history as intoxicants, aphrodisiacs, and even elixirs of life. As every amateur toxicologist knows, the difference between a poison and a medicine is often simply the dose.