T he death of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, has begun to shape up as thriller material with specula- tions on poisoning as a probable cause. This immediately conjures up the possibility, not of ordinary food poisoning, but murder. A toxic sub- stance, almost undetectable in taste or odour, ingested…and death. Navalny’s death is located within a history of elimination through poisoning. Most notably we recall Russian defector, Alexander Litvinenko, whose death in 2006 became a medical-foren- sic cause celebre because it was the first recorded case of polonium poisoning. Poisons are strange objects, mysterious, mystifying and malleable. In the superhero mythos, toxic materials — such as venom but also radiation — once in- gested, rather than killing the human, trans- form her/him into a superhuman. In thrillers and real life — such as the Litvinenko case — both, the poison and the poisoner are marked by subtlety and secrecy. Then, the poison is studied by both phar- macologists and toxicologists. It is the output of all biochemical processes, from digestion to industrial products. It is inside biological bodies but usually does not kill: they are nec- essary for the body’s processes. Their power is determined almost entirely by the effect they have within another body or context: did they cure or did they kill? They even become metaphors (‘poison pen’, people ‘poisoning’ others’ minds). Poisons have an incredible history, from the alchemist’s lair to the forensic lab. It is a his- tory of passion, crime, dangerous experiments and incredible cures. All Mixed-up Poisons have curative which scientists have explored. Many materials have been attributed with magical properties. Others worked to- ward transforming certain materials into pre- cious metals. John Emsley, the popular science writer, broadcaster and a chemistry faculty at King’s College, London, in his fascinating work The Elements of Murder notes that the use of poi- sonous substances was a common feature of the ‘science’ of alchemy, which was practised across much of the Ancient World, from China to Europe. Emsley notes how alchemists worked with ex- tremely toxic materials, notably mercury, because ‘they believed that all other metals, including gold, were composed of mer- cury, sulphur, and salt, with mercury being the most impor- tant’. In 1940, the economist John Maynard Keynes discovered that Isaac Newton had spent a considerable amount of time trying to make gold. Among the other sci- entific and philosopher luminaries who had an abiding interest in alchemy were Robert Boyle and John Locke. Newton’s tract, Clavis (1675), records that he had gone grey at 32, possibly due to exposure to mercury. Later letters document his medical ailments such as insomnia and bad digestion. LW Johnson and ML Wolbarsht in a 1979 essay in the Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London argued that Newton’s medical condi- tions were consistent with mercury poisoning, although records show he had also worked with lead, arsenic and antimony. England’s Charles II was known for his interest in alchemy, and his unexpected death has been attributed to his alchemical experiments with mercury in particular. This obsession with the transmutation of various metals into gold has remained, according to some commentators, unabated, although scientific attention to the speculative theories and practices around alchemy has waned. Mixing metals and catalysts often led to long-term damage, as historical forensics indi- cates in the above cases. But another history of mixed-up poisons also exists. Celebrities who have overdosed — or at least the pathology re- ports show massive amounts of potent drugs — include Jimi Hendrix, Judy Garland, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe and more recently Matthew Perry. Diuretics, mood stabilisers, analgesics, anti-depressants and plain psy- choactive medicines, painkillers… celebs have been hooked on them, and often paid the price. But these are special cases. We, the non- celebs, also ingest poison. Everyday Poisons Mercury arguably remains the preeminent everyday poison, being present everywhere. Studies in- form us that the average human consumes 3 mg mer- cury daily. It is a very old compo- nent of medi- cines, and we shed mercury every day from our hair and in our excrement. Mercury enters us through food and commonplace repair functions — such as the amalgam for teeth fillings or in mirrors. This history of common consumption, mistak- enly or intentionally, is captured in a rather cruel rhyme Little Willie from his mirror Licked the mercury right off, Thinking in his childish error It would cure the whooping cough. At the funeral his mother Brightly said to Mrs Brown: ‘’Twas a chilly day for Willie When the mercury went down.’ If we turn to the history of everyday toxifica- tion, pesticides and farm chemicals, effluence and radiation are all around us, and often in- side us. Rachel Carson inaugurated this history with her Silent Spring. Marla Cone in Silent Snow records her discovery of the high presence of Polychlori- nated Biphenyls (PCBs) in the Inuits and Greenlanders who live far away from industrial zones. She notes how ‘two hun- dred toxic pesticides and indus- trial compounds have been de- tected in the bodies of the Arctic’s indigenous people and animals’. Cone calls this the ‘Arctic Paradox’, where the land ‘untouched by contemporary ills, so innocent, so primitive, so natural, [is] the home to the most contaminated people on the planet’. The question of everyday toxins is not merely about the nature of the material sub- stance that we ingest but the contexts in which this material is produced, disbursed, packaged and consumed. That is, as environmentalists and journalists have documented from the lat- ter half of the 20th century, the toxin is em- bedded in larger social structures and eco- nomic practices such as toxic dumping in areas where the population is mainly of racial mi- norities, the dumping of unwanted pharmaco- logical products in Global South nations, the effluence from industries which take the toxic wastes away from the source but into other re- gions, among others. Entire generations grew up on toxins. Sandra Steingraber opens her memoir, Living Downstream, thus: I was born in 1959, and so share a birth- date with atrazine, which was first regis- tered for market that year. In the same year DDT…reached its peak usage in the United States… She adds: ‘for those of us born in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s…we were certainly the first generation to eat synthetic pesticides in our pureed vegetables’. While the environmentalists point to every- day toxins, literary texts abound in the exotic and the innovative. The literary obsession with poisons and poisoners is legendary. Poison Pens There is the famous hemlock that Socrates sup- posedly drank and died from. Edward Tabor in a fascinating 1970 essay in the journal Eco- nomic Botany tracks the role of plant poisons in Shakespeare, tracing the playwright’s knowledge to the vast circulation of tracts on herbs and histories of plants in the 16th cen- tury. There has always been a phar- macological undertext to t h e literary and artistic imagina- tion. In Shakespeare’s texts, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are notable for the role of poi- sons (although as a metaphor, Iago in Othello could be seen as a poisonous character). In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, believing her lover dead, stabs herself to death. Upon the discov- ery of her death, Romeo, tragic-stricken, takes poison, acting on this advice: Put this in any liquid thing you will, and drink it off; and, if you had the strength of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight … Early in the tale, he had faked his own death. A famous drawing exists of ‘Romeo gives money to an apothecary for a potion that will fake his death’. As critics have noted, Shakespeare in- verts the traditional association of women and poison by making Juliet kill herself in a more ‘masculine’ way whereas Romeo uses the more ‘feminine’ route. In Hamlet, there is the poi- soned wine by which Claudius attempts to poison Hamlet (only to have it drunk by Ham- let’s mother). Claudius had ear- lier assassinated the king by pouring poison into the latter’s ear. Hamlet’s death comes in a sword fight because Laertes’ sword has a poisoned tip. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the essay- ist Thomas de Quincey recorded their expe- riences of opiates. John Keats wrote, in po- etry, of the hemlock he had drunk. Arthur Conan Doyle employed a fictitious poison plant in ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’. Doyle himself experimented with gelsemium for his neuralgia and published his findings in the British Medical Journal. Doyle’s account of the effects of the chemical is repli- cated in Dr Watson’s description in ‘The Ad- venture of the Devil’s Foot’: A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Poisons figure in five Doyle stories of homi- cides. Jefferson Hope (Study in Scarlet) and Jackie Ferguson (‘Sussex Vampire’) use South American arrow poisons. Bartholomew Sholto is killed by a thorn dipped in “some powerful vegetable alkaloid” in The Sign of Four. An African root figures in one story, and the venom from an Indian snake in another. As Susan Can- non Harris notes in her essay in Victorian Liter- ature and Culture, Doyle consistently uses trop- ical plants as a source of poisons. Poisons are used for different purposes, not just for murder. For example, in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, Dr Candy poisons Franklin Blake with opium, and Blake steals the moonstone diamond under the influence of the drug. Lucrezia Borgia, the Italian no- blewoman, often the prototype of the female poisoner through the myths around her (there is no historical evidence that she poi- soned her husbands) became the subject of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia. When Salvador Dali was asked if he took drugs, he snorted and barked: ‘Dali is the drug’. But the most sustained use of poison as a murder weapon is surely in Agatha Christie’s fiction. Look at the sheer variety, ranging from the commonplace veronal to the un- usual phosphorus: arsenic, cyanide, digitalis, nicotine, hem- lock, opium, veronal, ricin, strychnine and thallium. Christie worked as an apothecary’s assistant at a local hospital in Torquay. Her knowledge of toxins was visible in her first work The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which incidentally received a very favourable review in, of all places, the Phar- maceutical Journal and Pharmacist! Kathryn Harkup’s thorough A is for Arsenic: The Poi- sons of Agatha Christie offers a detailed ac- count of the variety of poisons used, and ways of administering them, that the Queen of Crime dexterously employed as part of her vertiginously dizzying plots. Syringes, pies, wine, sandwiches, tablets, a meal …the list of methods of poisoning someone is innovative and often outright ingenious. For example, in her short story, ‘The Cretan Bull’, atropine is introduced into a salve used to soothe skin rash, and thus induces hallucinations in the victim. Christie’s clues are also ingenious. For ex- ample, in Five Little Pigs, Amyas Crale has been given hemlock and his nervous system is be- ginning to fail. Meredith sees Amyas stagger, but puts it down to tiredness and the sun, when in fact it is hemlock beginning to affect his limbs accompanied by a growing physical in- firmity. The second clue is in the statement Amyas makes ‘everything tastes foul today’, which Poirot immediately recognises as indi- cating that Amyas has ingested the bitter coni- ine before he is supposed to have consumed it in the wine. Pharma-fresh The poison fascinates because as a substance it is riddled with contradictions and paradoxes, just like the fascination for the extremely toxic puffer fish, considered a delicacy in Japan. First, many substances are both poisonous and curative in their properties. This is why the philosopher Jacques Derrida plays with the term pharmakon, which is the root of ‘phar- macy’, where pharmakon is precisely both, toxin and cure: [t]his pharmakon, this ‘medicine,’ this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces it- self into the body of discourse with all its ambivalence. Then, much depends on the dosage of the substance. The right dosage versus excess dosage marks the difference be- tween life and death. The dose or drug taken/given to alleviate misery or pain versus the wrong drug or dosage establishes, in forensic thrillers (including the new ones such as Knives Out), malafide intentions or thera- peutic efforts. Third, in historical forensics and literary fic- tion, the identity of the poison and the poi- soner requires considerable probing. The de- tection of the substance occupies the field of forensics, and is the subject of much specula- tion (as in the case of Navalny). As the intro- duction to the volume Poison and Poisoning in Science, Fiction and Cinema: Precarious Identi- ties (2017) puts it: Poisons in particular pose a special chal- lenge to identification: they are identified — or required to be identified — but they are mostly hidden, invisible, often imper- ceptible through the senses. They can permeate an entire world, such as when the green, arsenic-laden paint covering a widely used nineteenth-century wallpaper begins to peel, emitting highly toxic va- pors into interior spaces and into the bod- ies of their inhabitants. Then of course there is the question of time: how much time before the first signs of poi- soning appear, the time to die, and the window of time for the antidote (if any), just like the time before the medicinal properties of the pill popped in manifest. The poisoning of dissidents, celebrities and fictional characters, and everyday toxifi- cation informs our world. News reports as sub- stance creep up on us slowly, paralyse us with dread, tingle our nerves, do a parade through the spine. Welcome to the pharmacological unconscious. (The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK) Printed and Published by Damodar Rao Divakonda, on behalf of Telangana Publications Pvt. Ltd., Printed At Telangana Publications Pvt Ltd, H.Nos. 9-87/3, 9-87/3/1, Thumkunta Muncipality, Dist. Medchal-500078. Published at Telangana Publications Pvt. Ltd, #8-2-603/1/7,8,9, Krishnapuram, Road No. 10, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad-500034, Telangana State. Editor: Koothuru Sreenivas Reddy. Ph: +91 40 2329 1999, Toll Free: 1800 425 3666. RNI No. TELENG/2016/70426. A REWIND 06 HYDERABAD, Sunday, March 3, 2024 Poisons and poisoners THE ASSASSINATION OF DISSIDENTS THROUGH POISONING IS COGNATE WITH A LITERARY OBSESSION WITH POISONS Pramod K Nayar Historical figures like Newton and Charles II dabbled in alchemy, whose chemicals induced dangerous medical conditions Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko death in 2006 became a medical-forensic cause celebre because it was the first recorded case of polonium poisoning POISONS ARE STRANGE OBJECTS, MYSTERIOUS, MYSTIFYING AND MALLEABLE THE MOST SUSTAINED USE OF POISON AS A MURDER WEAPON IS IN AGATHA CHRISTIE’S FICTION ILLUSTRATION GURU G Telangana Today