Six Deadly Poisons

That precipices might not laceerate our mangled bodies, that the unseemly punishment of the halter may not torture us by stopping the breath of one who seeks his own destruction, or that we may not seek our death in the ocean and become food for our graves, or that our bodies may not be gashed by steel. On this account, it is that nature has produced a substance which is very easily taken, and by which life is extinguished, the body remaining undefied child and retaining all its blood, and

only causing a degree of thirst. And when it is destroyed by this means, neither bird nor beast will touch the body. But he who has perished by his own hands, he is reserved for the earth Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Pliny the Elder. Actually I'm Christian Seger. Today's episode was brought to you by a quote by a good old Pliny. Oh yes, yes, that's from the

Natural History, one of our favorite Roman historians. As always, you can't take everything that Pliny says um as the as the complete truth. I always take it with a certain grain of salt. But he's he he when we'll get back to the grain of salt thing at the end, uh, because that actually comes from the riding of Plenty. But he always has such interesting inside and commentary on the natural world, and in this case he's talking about the

wonders of poison. Yeah, it's a nice little poetic riff on basically the idea that our bodies are essentially like chemical machines, right, and that like think of it like as in comparison to a car, Like instead of putting gasoline in a car, if you filled it up with milk, that's gonna really mess with the system, right, and the exactly uh, And so basically we're focusing on how there are these things in the natural world that if you just put them into our system, boy does it really

mess things up. And for the longest time we didn't really understand why. Right, there was all this mythology around the reasons why we have a whole episode that's on wolf Spain or actually aconite, uh, and the surrounding myths around that and the science of how that poisons the human body. But we thought, you know what, it's let's pull out the handbook. Let's look at some of the otter poisons that are out there. Uh, specifically natural ones were not. I don't think we have any synthetic ones

in here. No, I think all of these tie into a natural source. And and that's really that's really the fascinating thing, right, is that these are all generally cases. Generally speaking, these are cases where the natural world, specifically that the world of of plants has produced various chemical weapons for their defense, and humans are able to manipulate those chemical weapons to our advantage. And I mean we do that with things that aren't even poisons. We do

that with spices. But in this case, we're gonna be looking at at at particular substances that that have been used and are used as deadly poisons, yet not all of these would necessarily be enough to fill up a whole episode. And also if we were just going to do an episode on poisons in general, that would fill up probably the whole podcast. So we decided, let's boil it down each of us take three that we're really interested in talking about, do the research, and then bring

it to you all. Uh. And I had to be honest. I mean, we've been talking about doing something like this for a while, but good Old Game of Thrones has definitely brought this to the forefront of my mind because poisons are so common on that show. Uh, if you're a fan, I'm going to refrain from or if you're not a fan, rather, I'm gonna refrain from mentioning any specifics. But George R. Martin has just created this entire world

of fictional poisons. He's got the Tears of is It Lists, Tears of Lists, then there's the Strangler and the Long Farewell. But then he actually uses some real ones as well. In fact, Wolf Spaane isn't in the show has mentioned before. Uh, he he distorts what their actual effects are. But we any of the milk of a poppy as well, which is a medicinal substance but can be overdosed on with fairly easily. Yeah, exactly, And so it's like this thing

that I don't know. In present day, we don't usually think about poison all that much because it's not common, even though it could be right, especially like when we go through these examples today, you realize like, oh wow, it's actually not that hard to get ahold of something that could absolutely kill my neighbor drop dead if I

put it in their Pooh. Yeah, I mean, and if you have if you have a child, or even have have pets though, you mean you're aware that there are certain certain substances you do not want them to get their their hands or their paws upon. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, So we decided to hit our favorites. Uh, and Robert, you're going to start us off today. This one sounds interesting, the Devil's Foot. Yes, so we're talking about you know,

where do we see our poisons use fictionally? Game of Thrones to be sure, but so many different murder mysteries in fiction revolve around a poison because it's always a mysterious death has occurred, and we have to connect the dots. It's like the classic answer to a locked room mystery is poison. Yeah, so uh, indeed, uh, I'm gonna talk a little bit about a fictional poison from the Tales of Sherlock Holmes. Uh, Sir Rotha Conan Doyle's tales that

actually has a real world counterpart. Uh, it was actually inspired by a particular poison. So some of my favorite Sherlock Holmes tales are the ones that did buck the more famous cliches. They're the ones where say Holmes lets the killer go free, or the ones where the narrative seems to tread dangerously close to supernatural waters. And so the perfect fit for both of these categories is nineteen tens The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, And it's pretty

much my go to tail. And I'm particularly fond of the nineteen eight Granada adaptation that started to uh, the wonderful Jeremy Brett as homes. Are these the ones that they used to play on PBS. Yeah, and this is this is a wonderful episode because it really gets into that kind of supernatural possibly supernatural territory and and even some kind of psychedelic scenes. H I agree with you.

I think like some of the best home stuff is where you're treading so close to something that's like a paranormal phenomenon, but then there's like an actual explanation for it. In fact, I know a lot of people don't love this movie, but young Sherlock Holmes, that was one of the things that always attracted me to it as a kid was that it was like teetering on the brink of being supernatural. Oh yeah, that that's one that I only have a vague memory of from when I was

a kid. But I actually thought it was full on supernatural woul until later that I realized that they were. They had an hallucination plot. Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah. So I am going to spoil the Adventure of the Devil's Foot for you. Spoilers for a one seven year old story. Yeah. And and if you are trying to remain spoiler free on this, if you're like making your way through the Granada television series or you're reading the books,

then I don't know. I guess skip forward like fifteen minutes, ten fifteen minutes and you can move on to the next one. Uh. But here's here's how it goes down. The case concerns a famed explorer named Dr Leon Sterndale and the feuding Trey Ginnis family. So Holmes and Watson there on a seaside holiday for health reasons. Um, you know, as you do, because Holmes has been taking too many

drugs again. He needs to clean him out. Yeah, it is, well in the TV series it is, so it's I don't think this is president in the in the actual written tale, but Jeremy Brad especially wanted Holmes to kick his m his addiction, so he consisted that this would be a good episode for him to kick his cocaine and morphine. Okay, Okay, I was just joking. I had. Yeah, well that's where I go to seaside towns for so.

So they're in the midst of this and Holmes is like, you know, he's taken his syringe and buried it in the sand. Uh. And then suddenly a local man, Mr. Mortimer True Guinness, arrives with a vicar to report a sudden case of insanity. So Trey Guinness's two brothers have suddenly gone mad and that the sister is dead. They find they find the two brothers disturbingly just stark raving mad in their kitchen and the sister Brenda, sets opposite

the window and she's just completely dead. So Sherlock investigates, and the early suspicion is that something terrifying appeared at the window and he killed her with frightened just drove them mad. So this, you know, just kind of potentially supernatural encounter, like what was this being that appeared at the window. But he starts looking at the evidence, and the ground outside the window is not disturbed. The mystery remains, but Holmes is is various. You know, he's gonna side

on the non supernatural explanation. But then Mortemurtregennis winds up dead as well, and there's this lamp burning beside him on the table. Now Here in the lamp home, Holmes finds some unburnt powder, so he test this out on himself. He burns it inhales the smoke and he nearly succumbs to madness and death as well. And there's just fab the sequence in the TV show where he has these

psychedelic visions of death. And then we we finally learn through his investigation that what happened is that Mortimer stole a sample of a deadly African poison from the local home of the explorer Dr Leon Sterndale. Now Sterndale had just left for a lengthy journey overseas. So more Mortimer thought that he was going to be out of the picture, you know, for virtually forever, because it was this is

going to consume the rest of his life. But he had He ended up receiving word of the sisters death, of Brenda's death, and Brenda he had loved her for years, but he was unable to marry her, so he had a deep connection to her. So he returns and he kills mortimurtre Guinnis with the same deadly poison that was used on his beloved. And the poison is that we're

told is radics pettus dialbolie the Devil's foot route. Okay, so why do they give an explanation as to why it's called that doesn't look like a little like demon foot, like a red foot with some tonails. Uh kind of, I mean sort of. It looks like a like a root and has devilish effects and uh. And I also remember in the Granada series, anytime they introduce it, they have kind of lists up, you know, African drumbeat in the background, which is really cool. Oh yeah, I'm recalling cheese.

Do you remember we talked about this in the Wolf Spane episode I think, or maybe it was the Mushrooms episode. I went to the dog park one time and there was this weird fungus growing in the dog park. I took a picture of it and put it on the Stuff to Blow your Mind Facebook page, and immediately members of our audience were like, oh, that is such and such fungus, and it was like the devil's horn, I believe the term for it. So that's why I'm sort

of imagining this this demon looking mushroom. I guess yeah, I mean certainly is an authentic sounding title. It is a fictitious poison. However, there is a grounding and actual botany, so this was This is really cool to learn. I was not familiar with this story until until recently when I started looking into it. So, according to two different sources, I looked at Here Books Health, the book's Health and History blog of the New York Academy of Medicine, and

as well as an article in the Guardian. According to them, Holmes creator Sir Arthur Cornan Doyle did some self experimentation of his own as a third year medical student at the University of Edinburgh with a substance known as gil simium, and he wrote about this in an in the in an eighteen seventy nine issue of the British Medical Journal. This is gonna turn out to be a common theme

I think today as people just trying stuff out on themselves. Well, it kind of gets back to our Wolf Spain episode where we talked about the mythical origins and Chinese traditional medicine, that you had this one godlike being that kind of went around trying these things and determining what was poised because essentially that sort of trial and error and then

you know the knowledge you passed on. That's that's where we learned that there are certain things you eat and certain ones you don't, and there's this gray area of stuff that you know exactly how much to apply and win. I think I'm glad that we're at a point in history, or I don't. I'm not in a situation where I'm like, I guess I should just try that, try, try a

small amount of it and see what happens. Yeah, I mean, especially with with the gil simium So there are three varieties of this Two are found in Central America, in one in southern China. It's a woody vine with bright yellow flowers. And the Asian variety, gil Simium elegans, is the most deadly of the three, and it's also known as heartbreak grass. So gil Simium was actually once used to treat migraines, but that but the key side effect

was loss of muscle control. So this is also a common theme, which is that, like, the reason why we know about a lot of this stuff is because we used it to treat various ailments. Yeah right, but that too much of it, too much, many things, bad thing. Yeah yeah, too much of something from your spice rack will will give you dire consequences in some cases. So, prior to writing this paper and conducting the self experiment, uh Doyle had taken a tincture of this stuff to

treat nerve pain. But for the experiment he took nine million leaders and he reported quote severe frontal headache with diarrhea and general lassitude. Okay, then he lassitude mean, I'm not familiar with that, that loose bowell syndrome. Well, you know, he's just kind of loose in the seat. I guess you would say, okay, alright. So then he up the dosage to twelve million leaders and at this point quote that diarrhea was so persistent and prostrating that I must stop.

At twelve million leaders. I feel great depression and a severe frontal headache. The pulse was still normal, but weak. It's too bad he didn't write this into the Sherlock Holmes story. It's just like this story about these big these detectives having horrible diarrhea and headaches. Yeah, death death by or with diarrhea um would have made it more horrific in some ways, but he decided to sort of you know, weird fiction. I think I think made a

classier so uh you know. The basic just here, though, is that s arthocon and Doyle was something of a poison enthusiast and he was a risk taker, so he conducted this experiment on himself. We we know now with the additional research into the matter, that an overdose of this stuff would result in dizziness, nausea, blurred vision, and convulsions, and higher doses could result in paralysis of the spinal cord and this would lead to a near total loss

of muscular power and eventually asphyxia. Not a good way to go. Yeah, it's not quite the madness and death of the Devil's Foot, but it's pretty bad. So. Gil Simium has been used as an analgesic and various homeopathic products, but the toxicity limits its usefulness. At the dawn of the twentieth century, was still being used in asthma and respiratory remedies, and it also factors into traditional Chinese medicine where it's used to treat pain. But it has allegedly

been used as a deadly poison. Uh. And this is this is where we end up with a couple of very recent cases of alleges to gyl simium poisoning, and they both took place in two thousand twelve. So, according to The Guardian, in two thousand twelve, the death of Chinese forestry tycoon Long Leon was linked to a quote poison cat stew containing gil simium. Is this a stew made of cat or a stew forecats, well, in this

case made with cat and gil simium. Yeah, I mean you occasionally find, you know, Chinese dishes that still have these these meats with Yeah, I'm aware from the time that I spent in Beijing. I remember that that kind of stuff being on the menu occasionally, Okay, wanting to make sure for our audience. So he definitely ordered it with the cat. But if there is gil simium in it, he definitely did not order that part. Didn't That was

some nefarious spice, right. So another case, and this one again is uh is alleged the two thousand twelve death of Russian businessman and whistleblower Alexander. This seems to be like a common at least like in terms of like news media where we're hearing about poisoning, the most is Russian whistle blowers. Yeah, I mean probably we could do we could do a whole episode just on espionage related poisoning. Yeah.

In fact, like as I was looking up like different poisons to hit for this episode, so many of the examples kept coming up. It was like, oh, in the last ten years, you know, this Russian former diplomat was poison this journalist was poison Jadiyata. Now and in this case, as with some of these these others you're alluding to, it's not certain. Uh. The gall simium link it comes via a life insurance company ordered test two years after his death, and based on that it has been suggested

that he was assassinated by Russian operatives. Wow. So, so I think that's a fabulous poison to kick off here, because we go from the fictional realm to uh, you know, this tale of an author testing a real poison out on himself, and then to uh, you know, recent alleged poisonings in China and Russia. All right, well, I will add that index card to my recipe book. Uh and I will I will counter that with one to you.

Have you ever heard of Spanish fly before? This is the kind of thing fourteen year old boys ask each other, as people who've listened to the show for a while. No, I actually grew up in Singapore, and you could kind of buy substances over there that you wouldn't necessarily be able to find in like American malls. Right, And there were constantly students at my school talking about how they had purchased Spanish fly while they were on a trip

to Malaysia or Indonesia or something like that. They'd like pull like a weird little vial out and it would just be some powder. And you know, fourteen year old boys, what's what's Spanish fly? Oh, it's this magic love potion and all you have to do is like, uh, put it on somebody or make sure that they eat it and they fall in love with you. That was the urban myth of this when I was in high school.

Right Ironically, there's actually a bit of stand up from Bill Cosby from his early years about childhood tales of of Spanish Fly and how wonderful it was supposed to be. So I'll just I'll just leave that there for everyone

to consider. It is it's like a really weird thing, Like when I think back on it, that like we would sit around and kind of talk about this and obviously there's no scientific marrit behind that, as I will get into, but talk about it as like, oh, this that's a really intriguing thing about the world that I didn't realize that there's a substance that just makes somebody fall in love with you, right like like, but in it's a wonderful way, I guess to rebrand a poison

for sexual assault. Well that's exactly it, right, Like I look back on that and I'm like, these these innocent boys around like the lunch table in the cafeteria are talking about this and you don't really realize. Then you extrapolated it out to Bill Cosby levels and you realize, like, oh my god, this is horrible. You know. Now, Spanish fly is a real thing, but it's not what I

was told when I was fourteen living in Singapore. Actually, what it is is something called can theridin and cam theradin is a substance that is derived from a subgroup of blister beetles and it can cause the skin to blister. This is where these bugs get their name. Specifically, the blister beetle is known as the Spanish fly or the lighta Vesicatoria, and it's common to a South European species from which can't theorides is extracted and commercially prepared by

crushing the wing covers on the adults. Now there's reportedly Spanish fly that is found in northern Mediterranean regions, not just in Spain. Basically, these bugs secrete cantoried and from their mouths and there's in their joints. They have this milky substance that seeps out. It sounds really gross, but the male beetle uses this as a defense mechanism. And

then here here's an interesting point. That leads to the myth the male gives the female this substance as a copulatory gift before they mate, so that might be like the origin of this whole thing. But it's actually quite poisonous. But despite how poisonous it is, it's used as a skin irritant and a diuretic, and yes, as an aphrodisiac

in some cultures. The lethal dosage for an adult human of Spanish fly is about ten milligrams, and in fact, one Jamma Dermatology article reviewed for this episode, it argued that cantherdin should be re added to the medications that doctors currently use in their office. Basically, it's used they apply it topically to treat warts or something like molluscumb

skin infections. In nineteen sixty two, however, here in the United States, it lost its FDA approval because manufacturers didn't submit their data about its efficacy, and it's expected to soon be back on what is called the f d a's Bulk Substances List, which permits physicians to use it in the office on individual patients. So presumably, if you came in you had a bad case, awards or something on your hand, your doctor would say well, you know it, I'll pull some of this Kent therap in out of

the old cabinet here, We'll put it on there. It'll blister away these warts and then your skin will be free of this. Uh. The JAMMA article actually also says that they could not find any reports of Kent therapy and poisoning being caused by the application from a physician. Okay, So while this is really poisonous and physicians use it, it's also you know, traditionally being used safely by physicians now, very much like the poison that you introduced us to.

It used to be used topically in Asian medicine, and they would use it to treat piles ulcers, venomous worms, and tuberculosis. Orally it was used to treat abdominal masses, rabies, and cancer. Huh. Yeah. It's also worth noting that this is very poisonous to horses as well as humans. So in fact, fields that are near horses are usually have to be surveyed to make sure that none of these beetles are in them, because if they get a dose of these, it can kill a horse. But where's this

reputation of this aphrodisiac come from? Where did this? How did this myth get to my cafeteria table in school? It's still a mystery actually. Now, obviously I presented you with the you know, idea that because this male beetle gives it to the female beetle, maybe there's something to that. That's also thought to be because it causes a dilation of blood vessels, which allows an increased blood flow, and that would be useful for one human organ through what's

known as priapism. This is essentially when the penis remains erect, non sexually for hours without stimulation. This is a word that I learned for this episode. Yeah, I mean you occasionally see this, Uh, this will come up in terms of say, a bicycle accident could Yeah, it's not it's not a pleasant experience. That's like the medical term for something. Yeah, like if you come into an emergency room and that is going on, that's what they should refer to it as.

So it's purported that Henry the Fourth and the Marquis Dessade both used Spanish fly. In fact, it said that the Marquis Desade poisoned prostitutes with candles that contained it in order to increase their sexual response. So based on everything that I've read of and by the Marquis assad that sounds right on point, but also sounds awful, right.

So the way that this essentially works, the intense irritation and blistering it causes is incredibly unpleasant, and when you ingest it, that same blistering effect happens in the intestinal track. This causes severe hemorrhaging. It leads to the vomiting of blood, darkened urine, and bloody stool. There is also a burning of the mouth, difficulty swallowing, nausea, seizures, and cardiac abnormalities. There is no antidote to this, and death is painful

and rapid. Do you Essentially it sounds like you're putting like battery acid in your throat. Yeah. Yeah, there's nothing sexy about this at all, no camp therodin has no odor and it's colorless. So this is like the perfect kind of thing to use as a poison, right. It also with stains degradation by heat or drying, so it's difficult to remove it, Like if you spilt it on something,

it's not that easy to get rid of. Now, there's this story about a guy named Arthur Ford and he worked at a chemical manufacturer in London, and he really wanted to get one of his employees to fall in love with him. He wanted to leave his life, and I think that this was like an administrative assistant who worked for him or something like that. So he took can' theradin from the chemical manufacturer's storage area and he spiked coconut ice with it, and then he gave it to

all his office employees. So this is this is where like these urban legends come from and then go horribly awry. Two women died, including the one he was trying to get to fall in love with him, and he himself was hospitalized but then recovered. When they investigated this, they found up to ten times the lethal dose of km' theradin in the victims. Guess what punishment he got for this? Oh, I mean, I should hope they just really put him away for two murders would be a horrible poison five years,

you got five years. It's actually thought by medical researchers that cam therapin poisoning may actually be a more common cause of morbidity than is generally recognized, So we basically aren't equipped to recognize this in all situations. So it's possible, like maybe some of these uh vials of supposed Spanish fly that people are buying actually have some kan theratin in them and could least lead to poisoning events. Okay,

so here's another story based around this. In nineteen two, a doctor in the United Kingdom tried using kantheratin on children and he wanted to use it to test against rheumatic fever to see what would happen. It had previously been thought to work as a treatment for rheumatic fever, especially when like as a symptom of that the liquid

would build up around a human heart. So this doctor he would use the substance to blister the skin on these children's torsos, and then he would snip away this blistered skin, uh and he dressed the wound and he would note, oh, well, the wound would heal in a few days. He tested around forty children in this experiment

without their consent or knowledge. So like he would just I guess say like, okay, well we're gonna try this medicine now, and it would burn them, cause these horrible blisters, and he would cut the blisters off, and essentially that was as far as he got with his research. Yeah, so okay, As I said before, there's no antidote for this. It can be treated topically with acetone ether, fatty soap, or alcohol, and essentially these help dissolve and dilute it.

So you know, you spill some of this stuff on you before it starts blistering you. You you put that on. Hopefully it helps dissolve it. But if you ingest it, there's only support measures available. So look, hopefully none of you out there are rushing out to go buy this stuff. It is an entire urban myth. I you know, I'm glad I never got my hands on any of this stuff. I never heard of any poisoning incidents in my school

and this was going on. I think mainly like what these guys were selling down at the market was probably just like they would literally take like a household fly, grind it up into dust and sell it to some duction for five bucks. You know, Um, they would dry

it out first, I would assume. But if there's any point where, for whatever reason, you think that like there's a danger that either you or somebody around you has ingested this, you're supposed to swallow generous amounts of water and avoid fatty foods like milk, And the reason why is because fatty foods will increase the absorption of the cantheritin in your system. You also don't want to induce vomiting. So some people think like, well, oh, you swallowed this,

just vomited back. But what happens if you do that is it will further damage the esophagus on its way out, So it goes down, it causes this blistering effect, and then if you try to vomit it back out, it causes the burning all over again. Yeah, this is really nasty stuff, and it somehow has this reputation as like this bizarre love drug. Well again, we can't. We can't stress strongly enough do not obtain Spanish fly and certainly

do not administer a Spanish fly. Yeah. Absolutely an urban legend, but it seems to be an extremely effective way to poison somebody. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to explore two more of our six deadly poisons. All Right, we're back. So you have a word written down here and it looks like goo, yes, Google, which is in this case, it is a a Chinese poison of sort of mythic

and folkloric origin. I like the like, if you extrapolate that to our word goo g o o, it's kind of like the perfect name for a poison, you know, like, yeah, oh, would you use just some Google Well, you know this, uh, this whole episode that I'm going to discuss here reminds me a bit of the comic that you turned me onto. Orc Stain. Oh. Yeah, there's a lot of poisons. Yeah, there's like a whole ride that lives in I think they live in the mountains or the jungle deep Jungles,

and they have this fantastic abilities with poison. They're able to shoot the orc assassins with a poison that makes their head explode, that sort of thing. Yeah. If if you're unfamiliar with this and you're curious about it, it's a comic series by a guy named James Stoko, and Orc Stain is essentially like a I guess high fantasy,

but pretty much all the characters in it are orcs. Yeah, and it has a very almost kind of gonzo style to it that reminds me a little bit of I mean, it has kind of that sort of heavy metal energy to it. It's a little bit a bit of that sort of uh, you know, what is a two thousand a d kind of sensibility. I think that's the kind of stuff that influenced him. Yeah, you know, I should mention this to you, but I'll tell our audience about it while we're here too. He has since gone on

to do Godzilla mini series that I highly recommend. Imagine that guy doing god and then he just started doing an Aliens mini series. It's called Aliens Dead Orbit and man, his take on the Aliens is so bizarre. Yeah, I mean he his uh use of body are and biology is wonderful, So I imagine that is as well. Keep that in mind as we roll forward here. So I found this, uh, this excellent source on Google in this article by A Norma Diamond that was published in an

edition of Ethnology. It's titled The Meal and Poison Interactions on China's Southwest Frontier, and it does a fabulous job just breaking down this concept of goo. So a lot of it concerns folk tales and superstitions surrounding poison and in the use of these superstitions against frontiers people and when women in particular, So we're talking about Han Chinese tales of the male people. The male are one of China's fifty five recognized ethnic groups, and these this would

be mostly in the mountains of southern China. Now, the frontier, Diamond points out, was this was a frightening place for frontiers tend to be on the edges of of empire. So there was periodic unrest because it was a frontier after all, and this was there were there's also a place where one encountered a different ethnic people with seemingly barbaric ways. And finally, she points out there were a number of endemic diseases such as encephalitis, meningitis, dysentery, leprosy.

So people, you know, would travel out to the frontier and they would come back with tales or oh the people were hostile and strange and they're all these weird diseases. They're horrible things happening to people's bodies there, and uh and and so you end up with a superstitious tradition that is very much grounded in um xenophobia really and

also in in in a good bit of misogyny. As we'll explore man these poisons already, we're just just on our third poison, we're already in some really dangerous social and cultural cultural territory. Yeah, because they would get into this, uh, this line of thinking to where the Meal were not only a people they used poison, but they themselves were poisonous and like they had to poison people to keep the poison from like eating them up. Wow, what a

what an odd form of demonization. So you had two main forms of the Google folk tail, and these are from the Tang dynasty and this is around six eighteen uh CE and onward. Uh. The first of these is the SoC idea of the five poisonous creatures. So in this one, Google was simply a quasi magical poison that was created by sealing the five poisonous creatures a snake, a centipede, a toad, a scorpion, and a lizard inside of a jar. And you keep it this jar in

a dark place for a year. Sounds reasonable, all right. Then you you open up that jar and you find that essentially there's a battle royale in that jar, but the creatures eating each other until there's only one creature left. And then if it of course dies and withers in in the container and So the ideas that you open the jar up and then you take the contents and you ground them down, you make a powder, and this is the goo poison that causes sickness and death. Holy cow,

Yeah that sounds vile. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out who would come out on top of this, uh, five poisonous creatures jar. I guess. I mean, my gut instinct is to say the scorpion, but uh, maybe the snake. I guess the snake if it's gonna actually eat everything. Yeah, right, but I don't you know, a lot of logistical concerns coming. You open it up and there's just this happy snake with a full belly. So um. So that's one version of it. But then there there there are other variants

as well. There's this idea of the goose spirit. So in this variant, you have a woman of the male and she takes, she keeps a snake, a toad or tortoise, or a bird. She gets it in a secret chest or a wall compartment, she feeds it. And the idea is that if her husband or lover deserts her for another, then goose spirit, maintained by this practice, goes forth and poison him. So it's used to ensure faithfulness or to

seek revenge. And Diamond also explains that there's this idea that the use of a goose spirit is away for the poisonous figure of the male female to purge herself of her own inner poison. The woman it was said she would she had read, she would would have reddened eyes, and she would become john too swollen and lose her appetite if she didn't use her poisonous powers. So if she were to use it to blight a tree, then

she'd be protected for three months. If she used it on an ox or a pig, she'd be protected for a year, and if she used it on a human being, three years. Okay, So this is essentially, uh, this section of China's version of witchcraft and familiars. It's like their cultural version of demonizing women. Yeah, it's a it's ay. Essentially,

we're talking about poison themed witches here. Yeah, she's okay. Now, if we set aside witchcraft offten xenophobia and so forth, uh, we still do have some accounts that point to believable use of poisons by the Mayo. So, according according to Diamond, we have we have the following candidates to consider, because again there are they do seem to be accounts of them actually using poisons as in their you know, in combat,

et cetera. So arsenic was readily available, and this is the so called king of poisons, and it's long head of place in traditional Chinese medicine, imagining like arsenic in like an aluminum can, like beer of poisons, uh and and poisons. Various poisons were used in hunting by the meal. So you had the one particularly's really interesting, the sap of an atterriss toxiccaria, a tree that's found in southern yunn and in Guangzi. And this is uh. This is

known as poison mother. And what you have here is a brownish red dried juice sometimes mixed with snake venom. And it was widely traded in the area around Nanning of where and I've I've been. I've been to Nanning, That's one of the places I've visited a few years years back. But I did not go to the poison You drink any snake, but did not drink snake. Um. I didn't have any occasion when I lived in China to have just any poisons either. But it seems like

this is one of those things though, right. It's like it's really easy from a Western perspective to hear this stuff and be like, oh my gosh, like there's just poisons all over the place there, but we've got our own version. Oh yeah, there are plenty of poisons around here. Now. This does remind me of, particularly of a Thai tradition of their being like a whiskey with us with a poison, like a cobra or poisonous snake. Okay, yeah, it's sort of like the idea of what is it with tequila

and you've got the worm? Yeah, and isn't there another one? It's not tequila, but there's another one with a scorpion. I think you can tell. I'm not a drinker, but but it's reminiscent of what we're talking about with the with the google here. Yeah, yeah, now that anitarrist toxicaria. It's also known as the Boys an Arrow Tree in China. It's because it's saying it's so deadly that they had this saying seven up, eight down, nine death. Because bear with me here, once you're hit with it, you can

only take seven steps uphill. Eight downhill or nine on even terrain before you fall dead. That's a great like a movie for for like a martial arts movie or so yeah like that, or or like a video game, or or even like a band themes fan indeed, So what happens here with with this particular poison is that the sap from this tree, the poison arrow tree, seems to affect the activity of muscle membrane and heart muscle contraction.

So you end up with death by cardiac arrest. So Diamond says, quote, a fatal dose causes a falling heart rate, respiratory difficulties, muscular weakness, paralysis, convulsions, and finally death within a short period of time. A sub lethal dose passes out of the body fairly quickly. The victim may experienced nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, and visual disturbances. So the problem here is that that doesn't match up with some of the descriptions of Google, right, Yeah,

the symptoms are different. Yeah, so other things to consider here. The meal can obtain the commercial strychnine around the dawn of the twentieth century, but before that they had access to our old friend asinite or wolfs bang oh, okay, okay, yeah, And I remember us talking about that in that episode two, that there was some thought that they were using that actually wasn't it on arrowheads? Yeah yeah, Uh, So it's

possible that they were using that for goo. However, it was a pretty common aspect of traditional medicine at the time and remains so. And again the symptoms don't necessarily match up with all the tales. It's also possible that there was some unknown herb that was that factored into these poisonings. Uh, you know, something that historians, especially Western historians, have missed or I mean, and maybe easy even been forgotten,

But I don't know. It seems it seems more likely that we're looking at one of those earlier examples, you know, the idea of the poison arrow tree coming into play, for instance. So I think it's fascinating how human beings over history take these things as simple as like a being or a tree or a mushroom, and we create these entire systems of like morality around them, right, like in this instance, like this witchcraft idea, right, and then in my next example, my next poison one, this is

like an entire way of of judging wrongdoing. It's called the ordeal being and uh it is known by the Latin term phiso stigma venenosum sounds very hairy, potter a. It's an actual thing. So numerous West African tribes used they used to depend on something that's called the caliber being and this was in something called a trial by ordeal and it basically it attempted to determine people's guilt or innocence in an ordeal that they left to divine control.

And so this was subsequently known as the ordeal being or also as the lie detector being for this reason. Essentially, what would happen is the tribes would feed numerous poison seeds to the accused to determine if they were witches, sound familiar murderers, or possessed by evil spirits. And if they were quote innocent, then God would allow them to live and they would vomit the beans back up. If not, the sentence of death was immediately carried out by the beans.

So essentially, here's this poison being. If it kills you, then you deserved it. Uh. If it doesn't, then well that's God telling us that you're innocent. Basically, we have the same scenario as like push the witch off a clip for put the witch under the water. Yeah, and if she lives, well, then I guess God thinks you're okay.

Exactly Now. The administration of this was known locally as chopnut and it was discovered by the rest of the world when missionaries from Scotland arrived in eighteen forty six. Then the bean made its way back to Scotland, where it was studied. A reverend there discovered that the local king had actually ordered the destruction of the vine that these seeds were grown on so that he could maintain

a monopoly on the administration of justice. So he essentially made it so that only his area could obtain these beans, so everybody had to come to him to decide whether or not somebody was innocent or guilty based on whether

they could use the beans or not. You know, this is fascinating because it makes me think of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because it's the time period, is right, Uh he was he And we mentioned that the University of Edinburgh and this has an African you know, like tribal ritual origin, where as the Gylsimium did not what the gylsimium was tied to South America or China, so I can't help, but wonder I mean, he he would have being if he was truly a poison nut, probably been

aware of this. Yeah, well, let's let's learn a little bit more about it and then maybe we can we can see if it's connected more to that Sherlock Holmes

story than the gyl simium was. It's also said that there was a form of dueling that was used with these beans, and apparently what they would do is two opponents would divide a bean and each of them would eat one half of it, and the quantity was essentially, you know, the only was known it could kill either of the adversaries, So even half a bean was enough to kill a man. So sometimes they would both die, sometimes one of them would die, sometimes neither of them

would die. But more often than not, these beans just killed you. So it's like a really high stakes drinking gang. Yeah. Yeah, So the calibar bean is actually the seed of a climbing lugaminous plant that's known as phiso Stigma venanos um, and it is poisonous to human beings when it's chewed. But hold on, if the whole being is swallowed intact,

it might prevent the release of its toxins. So this is apparently like the trick right like, if you ever find yourself in this situation with the ordeal being just don't chew and then you've got like a better chance. That doesn't mean that you're gonna live through it, but it's a it's more likely to release its toxins if you chew it up. Interesting. So these can be found in the coastal area of southeastern Nigeria that's known as Calibar, and like I said, they were first noticed in eighteen

forty six. It took actually until eighteen sixty one for botanists to name it, and they named it for the snooping beak like solid appendage that's at the end of the stigma on these vines. And it isn't until the rainy season there, which lasts from June through September, that the plant produces it's it's best most toxic beans. And the first medical student who investigated its effects on himself was a guy named Robert Christensen, and he's the one

who actually named it too. There's nothing in the external aspect of this being whether it's its taste or its smell to distinguish it from other harmless legume seeds. In fact, it's known to have been eaten by children accidentally and killed them. So this is again like seems it's got that, you know, qualifications for great poison. Right, it's odorless, it's hard to detect. Uh, it's we're about to find out like how it kills people. It's part of a religious

right as well. Yeah, So the reason why it's poisonous is because there there's a presence in it of something called phiso stigmine alkaloid, and this acts on the human nervous system pretty much the same way nerve gas does. It disrupts communication between the nervous system and our organs. This subsequently leads to contraction of the pupils, profew salivation, convulsions, seizures, spontaneous urination and defecation, loss of control of the respiratory system,

and finally death bi asphyxiation. This seems to be like the common and result of these poisons as asphyxiation. It also affects the reflex functions of our spinal cords, and in fatal cases it's going to paralyze the sensory columns in your spinal cord as well. Now it should be noted that this has no action on unbroken skin. Right, so if you unlike the Spanish fly stuff that I was talking about earlier, doesn't cause like a blistering effect if you just put one of these on your skin. Okay,

But ophthalmologists used to use small doses of this. They would derive phiso stig mine out of these beans, and they would use it to make patients pupils contract. Yeah. So like essentially they would really you know, boil this down to its essence, use a tiny, tiny amount and then drop it into your eyes. Well, just another case. I feel like I'm on most of these examples. The you know, one one individual's medicine as another's poison, depending

on the dosage. Yeah. Yeah, So in recent years, the chemical has actually been applied to helping paralyzed men who want children. Now, this is where it gets interesting, especially in comparison to the Spanish fly we talked about earlier. So, because this being affects the autonomic nervous system, it allows men who are otherwise paralyzed to ejaculate when they normally can't.

So this allows them to become fathers. Like normally, you know, if they're married, they they're you know, concerned like, oh, I'm never going to be able to be a father, you know, to my partner's child. But with this being if it's applied correctly, they can. So they see strange derivations off of this thing that has this cultural history of being used for dueling or judging whether somebody is

a witch or not. Now scientists today are actually conducting at ease to see if the alkaloid here can aid in reversing things like Alzheimer's disease because it affects neurotransmitters in the brain. And weirdly, it's also an effective antidote for another poison, and this is like one of the more more common poisons, a tropa belladonna also known as night shade essence of nightshade, So this is actually a

cure for poisoning by belladonna. Finally, it's being studied to see if phiso stigmine could be used as a way to block nerve gas, so like saren. For instance, if you're in a situation where you're surrounded by saren, if you take this it might be able to bind to the same kind of enzymes that saren binds too, So it's hoped that the right dosage will block the worst effects of the saren without causing lasting damage to the victim.

This is just fascinating, all these apparent ways that you could use this thing that is essentially like an evil being. And it makes me think of our small Bard episode talking about the importance of gene uh and particularly seed banks, because any any number of these uh, these uh, these biological specimens out there, uh, they may have hidden properties that we haven't quite exploited, you know, oh definitely, yeah.

I mean you think about it like this was didn't even start being explored really into like a hundred and fifty hundred and seventy years ago by Scottish uh missionaries essentially, right, So there's like potentially decades of research that could go into something that's just this ordeal being, and we could find all of these medicinal ways to use them. All right, Well, on that note, let's take one final break and when we come back, two more poisons and really that should

do yet. All right, we're back. So if you decided, um, how which poison you're gonna use yet by myself. Well, hey, man on whom I don't know, I guess I still want that one plenty was talking about that's just gonna be so uh, this one, I'm not sure this is the this is the one necessarily, but uh, but it's one that definitely pops up on other TV shows, that being rice and if I don't know, if you watched Breaking Bad, but rison shows up quite a bit. YEA.

So ricin is derived from the castor being plant rice Cinnus communists the same the same species that's responsible for all that castor oil in our medicine and even our food products. You grind the beans into oil and then you're left with a mash byproduct, and that's where you find the toxin. It's not a fast acting toxin, so symptoms here take between four and twenty four hours to set in. But ricin is highly lethal to humans. A

single milligram of the stuff is deadly evenhaled or ingested. Now, long before Walter White plotted to poison you know, half the cast of Breaking Bad with this stuff, the U. S. Military actually patented a method to purify rice and toxin for the coming Great War. For the First World War. Really yeah, okay, but but here's the thing. How do you deploy it on a battlefield. Yeah. It's not like you can just mash up a bunch of beans and

throw them at your enemies. Yeah, you can't. You can't have like a you know, a secret agent can only poison so many people. You can't do that to take

out an entire you know, groove of soldiers. The Hague Convention of e ended up stepping in and prohibiting the use of rice and as a projectile coding, uh, plus other dispersal methods that ultimately proved ineffective, because that's one of the things that you encounter with with a lot of potential bioweapons is Okay, the the substance itself is deadly under certain circumstances, but that doesn't mean it can really effectively be weaponized and deployed against, especially against like

a man troops situation or you know, or a major center of population. Wow. Okay, So I'm thinking by projectile coating, we're talking about bullets. So you literally coat bullets and ricing. That's that is what is specifically banned. Yeah, Now, as you might imagine rice and occasionally pops up in small acts of terrorism, but that it makes it an ineffective

mass terror weapon as well. According to a study from the New Zealand National Poison Center, terrorists would need several metric tons of rice and in order to in order to target a large population. So it's a lot of beans. Yeah, that's a lot of beans. And it's again it's an example of this is a poison that can be used with deadly efficiency on an individual basis, but it's not the kind of thing you would necessarily be able to dump into the water. So this isn't what we refer

to as a chemical of mass destruction necessarily. Now, um. There there is one case though, that's pretty interesting, where it was effective in an assassination poisoning. Uh and this occurred in nineteen sixty nine when an assassin fired a rice and laced pellet much less like our our above

example into the leg of defected Bulgarian writer uh Gegory Markovy. Wow. Okay, so like, h this is just blowing my mind, Like the idea obviously, like you see this in fantasy stuff like Game of Thrones, right, like, oh, I'll coat my sword with a poison or actually I think, doesn't um, one of the guys from Dorn he puts like some poison on his spear or something like that. Yeah, but like I don't know, I just never thought that would work on high velocity projectiles. A poison bullet, but a

poison pellet in this case. But we have examples to run through just what happens with rice and poisoning. If you inhale it, there's a respiratory distress, fever, cough, nausea, a tightness in the chest, and it's gonna lead to a heavy breathing, low blood blood pressure, and respiratory failure. If it's ingested, then you get vomiting, bloody diarrhea, severe dehydration, low blood pressure, seizures, organ failure, central nervous system problems, etcetera.

So either way, you shake it. And then of course, if you if you get shot into your leg as well, Um, some some bad stuff happens to your body, and it will happen between you know, in a four and a twenty four hour on set period. Wow. So pretty much of the six that we've chosen here today, most of them have derived from some kind of whether it's a beetle or a bean, something that's just kind of crawling around in our natural environment, something that grows naturally in

the world and exists. Yeah, they're all organic. You can feel good and and have and using an organic poison, but they just don't write exactly. Yeah, you can sell them at whole Foods, but they don't mix with our body chemistry, like just the science basically turns your body against you. Right. This next one though, is and I have to say part of my reason for choosing this was because of the term heavy metal. So it's actual.

It's an actual element that can can kill you. And the reason I found out about this was because of a movie called The Young Poisoner's Handbook. And I don't know if you haven't seen it. We talked about this, but if anybody out there has seen, it's this interesting indie movie from the nineties. I want to say, Okay, so when you mentioned earlier, I had no idea like where to place in the timeline. Yeah, I want to

say I saw it in the late nineties. Uh. And it is a true story about a guy named Graham Young. He was a British teenager in nineteen sixty two, and he used thallium to kill his stepmother and then sickened several other of his family members. And then he was found guilty of that. He was placed in an institution. Then he got released from that institution in nineteen seventy one, and you know what he did. He promptly went and killed two of his co workers with the same poisoning.

He seriously injured two more with thallium poisoning. So this is a guy who was like essed with thallium and he died in nine himself from a heart attack while he was in prison for his second term. Now, thallium is a heavy metal. This means it's a member of a group of elements that have similar chemistry to one another. This includes lead, arsenic in timany, mercury, and cadmium. All of these are toxic and they tend to accumulate inside

human tissues when they're digested. Furthermore, they pass along up the food chain when they're consumed. Right, So, uh, let's say a rabbit gets arsenic poisoning and then you eat the rabbit, you're then ingesting the arsenic yourself. To write, so, thallium is a known poisonous substance and it's commonly found in rat poison and insecticides, and it's nicknamed the poisoner's poison,

and the other nickname it has is inheritance powder. Uh. Yeah, But since the nineteen seventy is it's been strictly controlled because of how toxic it is. It's colorless, it's odorless, and it's tasteless as well as being soluble in water. It's essentially a soft gray metal that resembles tin, and it's so soft, in fact, that you can cut it with a knife. Now, thallium attacks the human nervous system and our internal organs, and this causes hair loss, vomiting,

and diarrhea. I think all six of these poisons. Of diarrhea is a common denominator. And yeah, I guess it's a pretty good symptom of your your body just giving up the ghost. Yeah, it's easy to confuse the symptoms of thallium poisoning with viral diseases like influence of For instance, only a dose of one gram can lead to death. So three days after you poison a victim, they'll start suffering headaches, muscle problems, convulsions, they might go into a coma,

they might experience delirium or dementia, maybe even psychosis. It acts slowly compared to a lot of the other poisons we've been talking about today, and it's very painful. It's especially attractive to poisoners because the symptoms resemble other illnesses and conditions, so you can usually get away with saying like, well, it looks like somebody has the flu, and then they

dropped dead a day later. Other symptoms include alteration of the brain, a fast beating heart that doesn't effectively pump blood, skin eruptions, swelling and sores in the mouth, skin atrophy, and something that's referred to as knees lines. This is m e E. These are when on your nails you get these like white lines across your fingernails. I've never heard of this before, but apparently that's a symptom of thallium poisoning. Uh. And you can also have just a

general physical sensitivity from your skin. There's also degenerative changes in the heart, liver, and kidneys, as well as bone marrow depression. The gastro intestinal phase of this poisoning that comes before the neurological phase, so that occurs anywhere from twenty four to forty eight hours after ingestion, then the neurological symptoms. Those can take up to two to five days.

The big sign that it's thallium and not something else is alopecia, meaning hair loss when your hair starts falling out, and this can occur up to two to three weeks later, but death actually can occur within five to seven days. It just depends the body and the dosage it's within it based on you know whether or not your hair is gonna fall out before you die. Essentially. Now, thallium was isolated independently by two chemists in eighteen sixty one.

We're talking about William Crooks and Claude august LeMay. But it was technically discovered by Crooks, and it's found naturally in things like crook site, laurendite, hutch In site, some pyrites, and manganese nodules that are found on the ocean floor. It can be recovered heard by taking the oars and roasting them in connection with the production of sulfuric acid,

or by smelting lead and zinc ores at the same time. Now, thallium has been used to poison people through their tea and other consumables, so this against is why it is the poisoner's poison. Uh. This actually happened in nineteen fifty three when Australian Caroline Grills killed three of her family members and a family friend by dosing their tea with thallium. In two thousand and six, a seventeen year old Japanese girl poisoned her mother's tea and then kept a blog

about how her condition developed. So she essentially, over the days was tracking how the thallium was affecting her mother. But it's just that just goes to show. Even in two thousand six, people were so hard pressed for some sort of angle for their blog. I mean, you had to try. She had. She was looking to get those CPMs from her Google ad Sense. I guess I don't know. No, it's horrible to make jokes about this. I think her

mother lived, so luckily it turned out okay. Thallium was reportedly plotted actually as a means to also kill Nelson Mandela when he was in prison, and then in two thousand four, Russian soldiers accidentally mixed thallium together with their tobacco. They were like handmaking tobacco cigarettes. They actually mix it together and then we're treated for poisoning after they smoked it, and then they used it as a talcum powder for

their feet as well. Yeah, yeah, So this just goes to show you be careful about what you put in your cigarettes, I guess, yeah, or what you put on your feet. Investigators from the World Health Organization also say that thallium was something that Saddam Hussein used to kill hundreds of dissidents. So this stuff has a long history. It's it's it's a nasty bit of business. Fortunately it can be treated. It's treated with something called Prussian blue, and this is a blue chemical pigment uh in a

combination of potassium chloride. It's actually thought that Prussian blue binds with thallium when it's inside our intestinal tracks, and this is more effectively than something that's called activated charcoal, which is often used to help the spell these poisons. So it binds better with it that it keeps it from being absorbed and then passed through the rest of your body. Activated charcoal, though, is recommended in the absence

of Prussian blue. So like most people's first aid kits don't have Prussian blue in it, right, But but you might have these charcoal capsules now you can buy charcoal capsules that your local health store. Yeah, so thallium's derivatives, they're actually really common in just everyday items that we use, like medical scanners, electronic components, optical lenses, imitation jewelry, thermometers. And here's a weird one. Green colored fireworks specifically have

thallium in them. Well, this is this makes the Russian account make more sense because I mean, do accidentally get it into your cigarettes. It has to be around, you know, around in some quantity. Maybe they were grinding up imitation jewelry and smoking. I hope they weren't smoking green fireworks,

but yeah, I'm not quite sure. It sounded to me like it was something that was like available on whatever base they were stationed at, and I think they thought it was just something that would help bind their tobacco together. Now here's the thing. Thallium, because it emits gamma rays, it can actually help doctors tell whether a heart is

receiving enough blood and oxygen. So you essentially injected into a patient and you can you know, use a combination of gamma rays and thallium to see what's going on with a patient's heart. And medically it used to be used to treat ring worm and other skin infections, but now we consider it way too toxic to chance that. So there's other better ways to treat your ring worm now than than thallium poisoning. So that's thallium. That is one of just a few heavy metals that can be

used to poison a human being. Yeah, well, I think we we covered six really good ones here. It is one of those situations where we could always come back and cover six more at some point. Yeah, if those of you out there found this interesting you want us to do more, please let us know. You can get in touch with us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. We also have our new Facebook discussion module where we have sort of more uh I guess, smaller

intimate conversations about topics from the podcast. Yeah, it's a good place for longer form discussion as well. Yeah, so if you want to confess to any poisonings that you've committed, you know, you can go on there and let us know. And rather than letting a million of our Facebook page followers know, you'll probably be letting like two hundred Yeah. Oh um, uh, take it with a pinch of salt like a grain of salt. I meant to uh to expand on that, so real quick before we close out

um plenty of the elder wrote about this. He used to he used the term grain taking with a grain of salt in the natural history, because he was quite obsessed with antidotes for poisons as well as the poisons themselves. And he shared the following. After the defeat of that mighty monarch, Maritha dots Neis, Pompeius found in his private cabinet a recipe for an anecdote in his own handwriting, it was to the following effect. Take two dried walnuts, two figs and twenty leaves of rue, pound them all

together with the addition of a grain of salt. If a type person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day. So take that with a grain of salt. But this is one of this is often attributed as being where we get that for etymological origin of the grain of salt. That's interesting. I don't know the grain of salt would help you

against thalium poison. I don't do not think it would. Okay, all right, well, hey, once again there go six deadly poisons, and if you have you want to get in touch with this directly, you can send your least poisonous comments to us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com