Sublime

It wasn’t until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that surgical training schools consistently provided human anatomical dissections for teaching and research. The demand for corpses was so high that professors took to robbing fresh graves for bodies.

You can plumb us by our language—the precise and delicate delineations for ways to administer treacherous death. Will someone try chaumurky tonight—poison in the drink? Or will it be chaumas—poison in the food?

Every so often, without warning, the lake would gurgle and a cloud of invisible gas would ascend from its anoxic abyss. Sometimes the gases were volcanic, other times a by-product of bacteria or algae. Regardless, the fumes were toxic and quickly asphyxiated anything in their path: animals swimming near the lake surface, loitering by the shore, cli

“Mercury is second only to plutonium in toxicity. When it first began to be used, centuries ago, nobody really knew its dangers. Mercury ointment was a treatment for the skin lesions of leprosy, beginning in the 1300’s.”

It would seem that English physicians were not aware of the work of Nikander or the dangers of lead, because colic and paralysis were rarely ascribed to lead poisoning.

moulinées