One of Washington Independent Review of Books' 50 Favorite Books of
2018 - A Buzzfeed Best Book of 2018
"Morbidly witty." --Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
**
"A heady mix of erudite history and delicious gossip." --Aja Raden,
author of Stoned**
**
Hugely entertaining, a work of pop 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**
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 mercury and lead. Men rubbed
turds 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. The most gorgeous palaces were little better
than filthy latrines. 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.
In The Royal Art of Poison, Eleanor Herman combines her unique access
to royal archives with cutting-edge forensic discoveries to tell the
true story of Europe's glittering palaces: one of medical bafflement,
poisonous cosmetics, ever-present excrement, festering natural illness,
and, sometimes, murder.
