Wine in the history of poisoning Part 4

Poisoning literature

Due to the mass poisonings in Victorian England and noisy trials of poisoners, formed a genre of detective literature. Chief nightmare of Victorian novels – is a nurse-killer or a mysterious woman-poisoner type Lydia Gvilt in Wilkie Collins’s novel “Armadeyl.

Also classics of the genre – Agatha Christie “Villa White Horse”, which describes the thallium poisoning.

A typical 19 th century pattern of poisoning is very clearly and simply described A. Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo “:


“We fool, possessed by a demon of hate or greed, wanting to do away with the enemy or kill an elderly relative who is sent to a pharmacist, calls himself a fictitious name under which it is even easier to find than if he called the real name, and, on the pretext that rats do not let him sleep, buys five or six grammes of arsenic, and if he is prudent, he has gone to five or six pharmacists, five or six times easier to find him. Got out the right way, he gives his enemy or elderly relatives a dose of arsenic, which would put him in place of a mammoth or mastodon, and from which the victim for no apparent reason, begins to emit such cries that the whole street comes to excitement. Then a cloud swoops police and gendarmes, send for a doctor who uncovers a corpse and spoons extracts from his stomach and intestines arsenic. The next day a hundred newspapers there is a story about the incident with the names of victims and killers. In the evening the pharmacist or pharmacists are to report: “This is it, I bought arsenic”; it does not cost anything to identify the murderer among twenty of its buyers, then grab a fool criminal, imprisoned, interrogated, made him confront, found guilty, convicted and gilotiniruyut or if it is sufficiently great lady, sentenced to life imprisonment. Here’s how your northerners treat with chemistry. ”

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