Poison legend

In the early 18th century, many people, including famous scientists like Newton, still believed that mercury could be converted into gold. Newton spent a lot of time experimenting with alchemy in his early years. And there are still many people like him. In fact, many dukes, emperors, monarchs and churches have actively supported alchemy.

　　Not all alchemists were liars. Some of them did try to make gold, and their alchemy research had three main goals: to turn worthless metals into gold, to create "elixir" that made people immortal, and to dissolve anything "universal solvent". Since none of these goals are possible, their efforts are scientifically meaningless. Nonetheless, alchemists have developed some basic experimental instruments over the past few hundred years and discovered important compounds, some of which can be turned into poisons, such as mercury, arsenic, lead, etc.

　　As early as the 17th century, chemistry began to gradually separate from alchemy and become a science. During this period there were several figures who are now recognized as true scientists but were secret alchemists of their time, such as Robert Boyle, John Mayo, and Newton.

　　Crazy Newton

　　Newton was one of the greatest scientists in human history. But there is a less well-known fact about Newton that he spent most of his time studying alchemy as a professor of mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1940, when economist John Maynard Keynes opened a box of Newton's manuscripts that had been sealed for 250 years, he was surprised to find a pile of notebooks that Newton used to record alchemical experiments. When Newton was writing his great works on physics and mathematics, he actually spent most of his time conducting alchemical experiments and transcribing ancient alchemy materials.

　　Newton believed that ancient alchemists knew how to make gold, but the secret has been lost. He was not alone in this belief. The great chemist Robert Boyle and the philosopher John Locke both believed this. Newton even warned Boyle not to tell anyone about their interest in alchemy.

　　Newton first dissolved mercury in nitric acid and added other substances to the solution. These experiments did not yield any valuable results. So he turned to heating mercury in a furnace with various other metals. His assistant and close friend John Wiggins once said that Newton sometimes did such experiments all night long.

　　In 1675 Newton completed a manuscript "Clavis" ("The Key") with a total of 1,200 words. He was only 32 years old at the time, and his hair was already gray. He joked that it was caused by mercury. Although there is no necessary connection between the two, there are several metals whose accumulation in the human body is related to their content in the hair. Mercury, lead, arsenic, etc. are particularly susceptible to binding to sulfur atoms in hair keratin. Therefore, by analyzing a strand of hair, it is possible to know whether a person has been poisoned in large doses of toxic metals.

　　Newton's alchemy experiments seem to have reached their peak in the summer of 1693. At that time he wrote an essay full of bizarre alchemy symbols and commentaries entitled "Praxis" ("Practice"). This shows that he was already in a very unstable state of mind. Newton was known for his short temper. Criticisms of his research work also created abnormal hatred in him. His feuds with famous scientists of his era, such as Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, were irrational. At times Newton almost completely cut himself off from the outside world. In 1693, when he was 50 years old, his behavior became so abnormal that it was suspected that he was mentally ill.

　　There is a marked hiatus in the published records of Newton's correspondence from May 30 to September 13, 1693. Newton wrote to Samuel Pepys on September 13, 1693, saying that he had suffered from indigestion and insomnia over the past year, admitting that his "mental state was not as stable as it used to be."

　　As can be seen from many letters since then, Newton's physical symptoms at the time included severe insomnia and loss of appetite, while his psychological symptoms included persecution of fantasies, extreme sensitivity to what he believed to be implicit criticism of himself, and memory loss - all of which These are typical symptoms of mercury poisoning. Two simultaneous articles published in the Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London in 1979 confirmed Newton's symptoms at the time. The authors analyzed samples of Newton's hair by neutron activation and atomic absorption and found that the hair contained more than four times the normal levels of lead, arsenic and antimony, while mercury levels were nearly 15 times the normal value.

　　Deadly solution

　　Another well-known poison is arsenic, although it has had many uses in the past and even now. The most terrifying thing about arsenic is that it causes harm to people unknowingly. When it gets into the air we breathe or the water we drink, it can cause harm to the body, so it is often used as a murder tool.

　　The Assyrians from the 9th to 8th centuries BC were familiar with estrogen. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that calcining estrogen with fire produced a white compound consisting mainly of arsenic trioxide. In addition, humans have long known that heating estrogen with soda ash can produce a lethal substance, which is soluble in water and forms a colorless and transparent solution. This chemical reaction does produce the highly toxic sodium arsenite that is soluble in water. So at a very early stage in history someone not only understood the lethal properties of arsenic trioxide and its salt compounds, but also knew how to make them. This knowledge is dangerous, but politically useful. It seems to have caused some unexpected deaths in history.

　　The beautiful Marie de Aubrey was the daughter of the mayor of Paris and a councillor of the state. She married a nobleman named Antoine de Brinville in 1651 and became the Marquise de Brinville. Antoine had a bunch of lovers, so he didn't seem to mind too much when his wife had an affair with a gambler named Gaudin de Saint-Croix. But Antoine's father was so brooding about it that he took Gaudin to the Bastille in 1663, where he spent six weeks worse than death. Full of anger, Gao Dan met a notorious poisoner in prison, and from the first day he left the prison, he began to play with poison.

　　He purchased the ingredients needed to formulate the poison from Christophe Grasser, a famous Parisian chemist, royal pharmacist and teacher of Louis XIV's son. Gaudin tried various methods to dissolve arsenic trioxide into the solution without attracting the attention of the victims, and his mistress tested the poisons on patients in a local hospital. She brought food and wine to the patients, much to the gratitude of the hungry patients, but their condition worsened, and some of them lost their lives.

　　The purpose of these experiments by the Marchioness de Brimville was to understand the lethal dose of arsenic trioxide and the dose that merely made people sick. The first target of her poisoning was her father. She first poisoned him in May 1666, and then poisoned him in October of the same year, in order to inherit his property. She was not reconciled to this murder, which also made two brothers beneficiaries, so she let an accomplice named Rajoce enter her house disguised as a servant and poisoned her two brothers the following year. At the same time, the Marchioness of Debrinville lived a lewd life and had many lovers. She wrote a number of incriminating letters to Gordon, in which she mentioned buying the poison formulated by Gordon. She hoped to perpetuate their relationship by killing her husband and marrying Gordon, but it backfired.

　　In July 1672, Gordon died suddenly in his laboratory, and letters written to him by the Marchioness of Debrinville were discovered. After several unsuccessful attempts to retrieve the letters, the Marchioness fled France, first to England, then to Holland, and finally to a monastery near Liege. Arrested and tortured in 1673, La José confessed to his crimes before being tied to a wheel and beaten to death. The French government sent a young Parisian police officer to Liege to arrest the Marchioness, who pretended to be in love with her, lured her out of the monastery, and arrested her on March 25, 1676. The Marchioness was tried, tortured, and finally confessed and beheaded.

　　The scourge of the stomach

　　Gout was a common disease in ancient Rome and the British Empire, incapacitating many upper-class men. People blame gout on too much wine and food. This statement may be correct. A popular view is that gout is a punishment for excessive luxury. Doctors have found that gout is caused by sharp uric acid crystals in the joints. But what is the reason for the formation of these crystals?

　　Many famous people in history have suffered from gout, including Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of the United States, British Prime Minister William Pitt, naturalist Darwin, etc. By the 20th century, it was found that one-third of gout patients had high blood lead levels. Now it seems that people in the past developed gout because they liked to drink wine, because in the past wine was without exception contaminated with lead.

　　Because the skins contain yeast, the juice extracted from the grapes ferments naturally, and the resulting wine contains up to 13% alcohol. This wine has been made, bought, sold and enjoyed by people since ancient times. But winemakers also face a certain risk: other yeasts can also get into the wine, converting much of the alcohol into acetic acid. While vinegar can also be sold separately, it is far less in demand than wine.

　　It is unknown who discovered the secret - the addition of lead oxide can preserve wine and even improve taste, a method that has always been a trick used by winemakers. A book titled "Valuable Art and Industry Secrets", published near London in 1795, offered a way to incorporate lead-containing compounds into wine. The key to this method is to add a pint (about half a liter) of lead yellow (lead oxide) solution to each large barrel (225 liters) of wine. The resulting wine does not spoil and has a hint of sweetness. Lead yellow reacts with acetic acid to produce soluble lead acetate, which brings the lead content in the wine to more than 50ppm, which is enough to inactivate the enzymes of the yeast that destroy the alcohol content in the wine without affecting the taste of the wine.

　　As in ancient Roman times, in the Middle Ages and in the centuries that followed, wine ** that had been intentionally or unintentionally laced with lead caused great suffering to countless drinkers. Sometimes the lead content in the wine can lead to outbreaks of severe lead poisoning. People give this symptom various names, most of which are named after the place where these events occurred. The most famous is the "Devon Acute Abdominal Pain" incident in 18th-century England, which killed thousands of people, mainly men. They all developed horrific symptoms such as paralysis, mental disorder, blindness, and some even died. The first reported case occurred in 1703, and the disease has spread year by year since then.

　　The greatest contributor to the mystery of "acute abdominal pain in Devon" was the Queen's Physician George Baker. He got in touch with Benjamin Franklin. Franklin mentioned to Baker the lead poisoning incident in Boston in his boyhood, which stemmed from the lead distiller used to distill rum.

　　George Baker revealed in 1767 that the cause of "acute abdominal pain in Devon" was lead poisoning. He proved indisputably through chemical tests that most ciders produced in Devon contained lead, while ciders produced in other regions were not contaminated with lead. Baker also identified the culprits behind the entry of lead into the cider: lead-lined apple presses or fermentation vessels and lead pipes that transport the cider into the fermenter.

　　Because lead compounds were used for general medical purposes at the time and could have obvious curative effects, many people disagreed with Baker's findings, and even Catholic clergy called George Baker "a godless guy in Devon." But Baker still spread his findings through various speaking engagements and pointed out that other unexplained diseases may also be caused by lead.

　　Thanks to the advocacy campaigns of Baker and others, the public became aware of the health hazards of lead in the late 18th century. However, concerns about lead did not last long. In the 19th century, lead pipes were widely used again.