The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul by Eleanor Herman
Non-fiction books about chemistry, especially where chemistry and sociology intersect, are one of my fun go-to reads (or listens, in this case.) I was kind of hoping it would be like The Poisoner’s Handbook, which was like a grimoire of heavy metals and the horrible things they can do to a human or animal body. This book is less chemistry and more history.
This book primarily deals with royal and famous people the middle ages and Renaissance in Europe. The first section of the book talked a lot about how even the wealthiest royals lived in squalor and filth, constantly paranoid about the threat of poison while being oblivious to such things as “dog shit and dead body parts mixed with mercury will not cure you, no matter what your astrological sign.” Apparently one of the reasons why medieval courts traveled so often is that the courtiers were not housebroken. It makes me want to travel back in time just to shout, mom-like, “get that out of your mouth” and “that is not a potty, young man.” I often listen to audiobooks while cooking or eating, but had to forgo that routine because a lot of the subject matter put me off my chow.
The second half of the book was a list of quasi-murder mysteries. The author told the story of a famous person who was said to have been poisoned, and deduced whether they probably were or not. Much of the time, the answer was “they were sick with something else, but the doctors poisoned them, which didn’t help.” Fun fact: toxic heavy metals will not cure typhoid fever. I’m not exceedingly well-versed in medieval and Renaissance European history, so a lot of these people were just names I remember having heard briefly (or not at all) but the author gave enough of their backstory that you really got a sense of who they were as a person and what their place in life was before telling you about the horrible death they suffered.
So the book was pretty interesting, in that I’m interested in chemistry and toxicology, but I think if I were a European history buff (not just medieval: apparently Putin is one of the world’s greatest living poisoners) I think this book would be absolutely fascinating. It’s like reading the last page of a bunch of famous people’s murder mysteries to find out who did it. Royal people who had royal doctors in the middle ages? Probably helped along to their untimely end by the enemas, bleeding and poisonous cures their doctors gave them. Medieval nobility who drank sewage-tainted water and used lead and arsenic-based tonics? Ya poisoned yourself, bro. People who oppose Russian or North Korean dictators? Um … heart attack. Yeah. Just a heart attack. Totally natural. A-yup. Nothing fishy here.
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