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Author: Olen R. Brown
Publisher: Bentham Science Publishers
ISBN: 1681086972
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Poisons, due to their lethal nature, invoke a sense of fear in humans. Yet, they have also impacted other aspects of human life. Poisons have been used by nomadic hunters to kill their prey, by scientists to explore complex biochemical mechanisms of the body, by physicians to lower cholesterol and to kill cancer cells, by farmers and the general public to destroy pests, by the evil minded for homicide, and by tyrants as weapons of war. The Art and Science of Poisons presents two facets of poisons: the science behind them and their place in history and art. The science of poisons describes their biochemistry and how they kill. The science story voyages into the sub-microscopic world of atoms, molecules, and cells. Only there can we see the true miracles and mysteries of life and death. Chapters in the book explore poisons from snakes, spiders, scorpions, sea creatures, as well as poisons made by humans in the laboratory, and those which are derived from beautiful plants. The art of poisons, on the other hand, encompasses everything else about these agents that conjures up the image of the skull and crossbones. This side of the story explores the legends and tales of intrigue and surreptitious deaths of well-known personalities such as Socrates, Cleopatra, Hitler, and many more. General readers with a curiosity about science and an interest in history and human nature will enjoy both facets presented in this brief, yet varied exploration into the world of poisons.
Author: Olen R. Brown
Publisher: Bentham Science Publishers
ISBN: 1681086972
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Get Book Here
Book Description
Poisons, due to their lethal nature, invoke a sense of fear in humans. Yet, they have also impacted other aspects of human life. Poisons have been used by nomadic hunters to kill their prey, by scientists to explore complex biochemical mechanisms of the body, by physicians to lower cholesterol and to kill cancer cells, by farmers and the general public to destroy pests, by the evil minded for homicide, and by tyrants as weapons of war. The Art and Science of Poisons presents two facets of poisons: the science behind them and their place in history and art. The science of poisons describes their biochemistry and how they kill. The science story voyages into the sub-microscopic world of atoms, molecules, and cells. Only there can we see the true miracles and mysteries of life and death. Chapters in the book explore poisons from snakes, spiders, scorpions, sea creatures, as well as poisons made by humans in the laboratory, and those which are derived from beautiful plants. The art of poisons, on the other hand, encompasses everything else about these agents that conjures up the image of the skull and crossbones. This side of the story explores the legends and tales of intrigue and surreptitious deaths of well-known personalities such as Socrates, Cleopatra, Hitler, and many more. General readers with a curiosity about science and an interest in history and human nature will enjoy both facets presented in this brief, yet varied exploration into the world of poisons.
Author: Eleanor Herman
Publisher: Prelude Books
ISBN: 071565313X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
The story of poison is the story of power... For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications and filthy living conditions. Women wore makeup made with lead. Men rubbed feces on their bald spots. Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. Gazing at gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes and the stench of unwashed bodies; the lice feasting on private parts; and worms nesting in the intestines. The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.
Author: Maria V. Snyder
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1459248260
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
From New York Times Bestselling Author Maria V. Snyder Choose: a quick death… or slow poison… Locked deep in the palace dungeon for killing her abuser, Yelena knows she’ll never be free again. The laws in Ixia are strict, and murderers must be executed, no matter the reason. But just as she’s resigned herself to her fate, she’s offered an extraordinary reprieve. As the food taster, Yelena will eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace—and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia. To make matters worse, the chief of security deliberately feeds her Butterfly’s Dust, and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison. As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can’t control. Her life is threatened again, and in order to survive, she must unravel the secrets behind the past she’s been running from. The Chronicles of Ixia Series by Maria V Snyder Book One: Poison Study Book Two: Magic Study Book Three: Fire Study Book Four: Storm Glass Book Five: Sea Glass Book Six: Spy Glass Book Seven: Shadow Study Book Eight: Night Study Book Nine: Dawn Study
Author: Neil Bradbury, Ph.D.
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250270766
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
“A fascinating tale of poisons and poisonous deeds which both educates and entertains.” --Kathy Reichs A brilliant blend of science and crime, A TASTE FOR POISON reveals how eleven notorious poisons affect the body--through the murders in which they were used. As any reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison is one of the most enduring—and popular—weapons of choice for a scheming murderer. It can be slipped into a drink, smeared onto the tip of an arrow or the handle of a door, even filtered through the air we breathe. But how exactly do these poisons work to break our bodies down, and what can we learn from the damage they inflict? In a fascinating blend of popular science, medical history, and true crime, Dr. Neil Bradbury explores this most morbidly captivating method of murder from a cellular level. Alongside real-life accounts of murderers and their crimes—some notorious, some forgotten, some still unsolved—are the equally compelling stories of the poisons involved: eleven molecules of death that work their way through the human body and, paradoxically, illuminate the way in which our bodies function. Drawn from historical records and current news headlines, A Taste for Poison weaves together the tales of spurned lovers, shady scientists, medical professionals and political assassins to show how the precise systems of the body can be impaired to lethal effect through the use of poison. From the deadly origins of the gin & tonic cocktail to the arsenic-laced wallpaper in Napoleon’s bedroom, A Taste for Poison leads readers on a riveting tour of the intricate, complex systems that keep us alive—or don’t.
Author: Curtis D. Klaassen
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Book Company Limited
ISBN: 9780071139274
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 912
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Book Description
This updated and revised edition delineates the basic concepts and fundamental principles needed to grasp current issues in modern toxicology. In addition, new contributions help to redefine the book's scope and coverage, and illuminate new and emerging areas of toxicologic interest.
Author: Deborah Blum
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101524898
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Equal parts true crime, twentieth-century history, and science thriller, The Poisoner's Handbook is "a vicious, page-turning story that reads more like Raymond Chandler than Madame Curie." —The New York Observer “The Poisoner’s Handbook breathes deadly life into the Roaring Twenties.” —Financial Times “Reads like science fiction, complete with suspense, mystery and foolhardy guys in lab coats tipping test tubes of mysterious chemicals into their own mouths.” —NPR: What We're Reading A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever. Together with toxicologist Alexander Gettler, the duo set the justice system on fire with their trailblazing scientific detective work, triumphing over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice. In 2014, PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE released a film based on The Poisoner's Handbook.
Author: Heike Klippel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319649094
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
This book is about poison and poisonings; it explores the facts, fears and fictions that surround this fascinating topic. Poisons attract attention because they are both dangerous and hard to discover. Secretive and invisible, they are a challenging object of representation. How do science studies, literature, and especially film—the medium of the visible—explain and show what is hidden? How can we deal with uncertainties emerging from the ambivalence of dangerous substances? These considerations lead the editors of this volume to the notion of “precarious identities” as a key discursive marker of poisons and related substances. This book is unique in facilitating a multi-faceted conversation between disciplines. It draws on examples from historical cases of poisoning; figurations of uncertainty and blurred boundaries in literature; and cinematic examples, from early cinema and arthouse to documentary and blockbuster. The contributions work with concepts from gender studies, new materialism, post-colonialism, deconstructivism, motif studies, and discourse analysis.
Author: Alisha Rankin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226744858
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.
Author: Mary Allerton Kilbourne Matossian
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300051216
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Did food poisoning cause the Black Plague, the Salem witch-hunts, and other significant events in human history? In this pathbreaking book, historian Mary Kilbourne Matossian argues that epidemics, sporadic outbursts of bizarre behavior, and low fertility and high death rates from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries may have been caused by food poisoning from microfungi in bread, the staple food in Europe and America during this period. "A bold book with a stimulating thesis. Matossian's claims for the role of food poisoning will need to be incorporated into any satisfactory account of past demographic trends."--John Walter, Nature "Matossian's work is innovative and original, modest and reasoned, and opens a door on our general human past that historians have not only ignored, but often did not even know existed."--William Richardson, Environmental History Review "This work demonstrates an impressive variety of cross-national sources. Its broad sweep also reveals the importance of the history of agriculture and food and strengthens the view that the shift from the consumption of mold-poisoned rye bread to the potato significantly contributed to an improvement in the mental and physical health of Europeans and Americans."--Naomi Rogers, Journal of American History "This work is a true botanical-historical tour de force."--Rudolf Schmid, Journal of the International Association of Plant Taxonomy "Intriguing and lucid."--William K. Beatty, Journal of the American Medical Association
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 1551991764
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.
