A handy list of poisons for writing reference, provided to you by me, Bella
Poisoning is one of the oldest murder tactics in the books. It was the old equalizer, and while it’s often associated with women, historically men are no less likely to poison you. This is not a guide on how to poison people, you banana bunches, it’s a guide on writing about poisons in fiction so you don’t end up on a watch list while researching them. I’ve taken that hit for you. You’re welcome. These are just a few of the more classic ones.
Hemlock: Hemlock (conium maculatum) is one of the more famous ones, used in ancient times most notably in Socrates’ forced suicide execution. So it goes. The plant has bunches of small, white flowers, and can grow up to ten feet tall. It’s a rather panicky way to die, although it wouldn’t show: hemlock is a paralytic, so the cause of death is most often asphyxiation due to respiratory paralysis, although the mind remains unaffected and aware.
Belladonna: Atropa belladonna is also called deadly nightshade. It has pretty, trumpet-shaped purple flowers and dark, shiny berries that actually look really delicious which is ironic since it’s the most toxic part of the plant. The entire plant is poisonous, mind you, but the berries are the most. One of the most potent poisons in its hemisphere,it was used as a beauty treatment, so the story says, and rubbed into the eyes to make the eyes dilate and the cheeks flush. Hench the name beautiful lady. The death is more lethargic than hemlock, although its symptoms are worse: dilated pupils, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, tachycardia, loss of balance, staggering, headache, rash, flushing, severely dry mouth and throat, slurred speech, urinary retention, constipation, confusion, hallucinations, delirium, and convulsions. It’s toxic to animals, but cattle and rabbits can eat it just fine, for some reason.
Arsenic: Arsenic comes from a metalloid and not a plant, unlike the others here, but it’s easily the most famous and is still used today. Instead of being distilled from a plant, chunks of arsenic are dug up or mined. It was once used as a treatment for STDs, and also for pest control and blacksmithing, which was how many poisoners got access to it. It was popular in the middle ages because it looked like a cholera death, due to acute symptoms including stomach cramps, diarrhea, confusion, convulsions, vomiting, and death. Slow poisoning looked more like a heart attack. The Italians famously claimed that a little arsenic improved the taste of wine.
Strychnine: Strychnine (strick-nine) is made from the seed of strychnos nux vomica and causes poisoning which results in muscular convulsions and eventually death through asphyxia. Convulsions appear after inhalation or injection—very quickly, within minutes—and take somewhat longer to manifest after ingestion, around approximately 15 minutes. With a very high dose, brain death can occur in 15 to 30 minutes. If a lower dose is ingested, other symptoms begin to develop, including seizures, cramping, stiffness, hypervigilance, and agitation. Seizures caused by strychnine poisoning can start as early as 15 minutes after exposure and last 12 – 24 hours. They are often triggered by sights, sounds, or touch and can cause other adverse symptoms, including overheating, kidney failure, metabolic and respiratory acidosis. During seizures, abnormal dilation, protrusion of the eyes, and involuntary eye movements may occur. It is also slightly hallucinogenic and is sometimes used to cut narcotics. It also notably has no antidote. In low doses, some use it as a performance enhancer.
Curare:Chondrodendron tomentosum is lesser known than its famous cousins, but kills in a very similar way to hemlock. It is slow and terrible, as the victim is aware and the heart may beat for many minutes after the rest of the body is paralyzed. If artificial respiration is given until the poison subsides, the victim will survive.
Wolfsbane: Aconitum has several names; Monkshood, aconite, Queen of Poisons, women’s bane, devil’s helmet) and is a pretty, purple plant with gourd-shaped flowers. The root is the most potent for distillation. Marked symptoms may appear almost immediately, usually not later than one hour, and with large doses death is near instantaneous. Death usually occurs within two to six hours in fatal poisoning. The initial signs are gastrointestinal including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. This is followed by a sensation of burning, tingling, and numbness in the mouth and face, and of burning in the abdomen. In severe poisonings pronounced motor weakness occurs and sensations of tingling and numbness spread to the limbs. The plant should be handled with gloves, as the poison can seep into the skin.
Foxglove: Digitalis is large with trumpet-shaped flowers that can be many colors, but usually a pinkish shade. It may have from the term foxes-glew, which translated to fairy music. Intoxication causes nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, as well as sometimes resulting in xanthopsia (jaundiced or yellow vision) and the appearance of blurred outlines (halos), drooling, abnormal heart rate, cardiac arrhythmias, weakness, collapse, dilated pupils, tremors, seizures, and even death. Slowed heartbeat also occurs. Because a frequent side effect of digitalis is reduction of appetite and the mortality rate is low, some individuals have used the drug as a weight-loss aid. It looks a bit like comfrey, which is an aid for inflammation. Make sure not to confuse the two.
Okay so this dude with a doctorate?? Who specializes is Old Norse??? Just makes his instructional videos in the middle of the wilderness in the Midwest??????
Exactly! He used to teach at UCalifornia Berkeley, and now he’s at UColorado Boulder.
also, as a coda—I love that finn’s first instinct once he throws his lot in with the resistance is glorious pointless martyrdom, to the point that rose has to physically stop him from throwing his life away
I mean this is finn, whose bone-deep sense of self and hunger for life broke almost two decades of stormtrooper programming! and he’s ready to die! what on earth could possibly….?
mostly I like this idea because it enables me to believe that when finn thinks of heroism and The Cause, that circuit is still wired wrong in his head, tangled up with all the first order propaganda, the latent programming whispering that he’s just cannon fodder. This is what he’s good for this is how he’s meant to serve the first order the resistance; don’t you want to kill the thing you hate, don’t you hate them, the enemy who threatens you, threatens your squad, isn’t that worth your death?
(rose isn’t wrong, they are fighting to save what they love. just—so is the first order. everyone is fighting to save what they love, that’s the part that makes this so fucking awful.)
(what the first order wants to save is worse. that’s how you know.)
anyway, I love the idea that even now, finn thinks in the violent, objectifying (as in, it turns people into objects) vocabulary the first order gave him. I just….really want him to be unpicking all the wrong shit left in his head, slowly but surely.
I like this idea. But also…
Can we really say Finn’s actions were pointless?
At that point, the last stand of the Resistance with no real hope for rescue that anyone was sure of at the time, surely there is no option but to continue the attack even if it is suicidal. The scene is clearly meant to rhyme with Poe’s dreadnought attack at the start of the film, but there (since no-one was aware of the tracking yet) it at least made some sense to conserve their forces and strength for another time.
Here?
If Luke hadn’t turned up – and they had no reason to know he would – everyone would be dead. If you’re going to die anyway, choose how you do it – and if they had managed to destroy the cannon then they would have saved everyone else inside.
This is obviously a Watsonian critique of the fact that Rose’s actions only make sense if you assume characters have knowledge of what’s going to happen in the plot in the future – that she had a hope of rescue that doesn’t make much sense in story. Obviously I don’t think the film should have had Finn die even if it did save everyone. They just ought to have approached the whole issue in a different way rather than forcing Poe to learn a lesson that didn’t apply in these very different circumstances and which basically amounts to ‘don’t try too hard and wait for your leaders to pull something out of their ass to save you all – you don’t need to know the details’.
I just was a homeless orphan, living on the streets of Washington, DC.
Every day, I would stop and look up at the White House, imagining how nice it would be to be inside those white walls, warm and fed, with the riches of the entire 13 trillion dollar United States budget deficit at my disposal.
One day, I was standing across the street from the White House as usual, digging through a dumpster and clutching my only companion close to my chest: a small pendant filled with plutonium that my mother had given to me before she died mysteriously.
Just then, a black limousine came out of the gates of the white house. The window rolled down. It was the Secretary of State. He looked directly at me and saw my plutonium pendant. “That’s plutonium!” He cried. “After her!”
Instantly a fully armed SWAT team came running after me. I ran through the slums and back alleys of DC, knowing that I could easily escape them because I knew the city better than they did.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t watching where I was going and I tripped and fell into the pool in front of the Washington Monument. The SWAT team pulled me out and brought me back to the White House.
Once there, they dumped me, still wet, in the Oval Office. The President was there, in his chair.
“Who is this girl?” he said. “Why have you brought her to me?”
“She was carrying this, Mr. President,” said a secret service agent, and held out the plutonium pendant.
“Aha! Plutonium!” Said the President. “How did you get that?”
“My mother gave it to me,” I said.
“What was your mother’s name?” asked the President.
“Jane Smith,” I answered.
“Jane Smith!” said the President. “I did not know you were the daughter of Jane Smith! Your mother was a member of a secret organization called the CIA. She served us well, but died fighting the evil organization known as ISIS. She must have given you the plutonium to protect it.”
“She must have,” I agreed.
The President gave the plutonium back to me. “In honor of your mother’s memory,” he said, “I’ve decided to give you a White House internship. Who knows? If you serve well enough, you may one day become a helicopter pilot for the Secret Service.”
“Thank you,” I said, overwhelmed.
“Oh, and one more thing,” said the President. “This belonged to your father.” He took down an AR-15 hanging on the wall and handed it to me. “Use it wisely.”
I say this every time I argue for raising the minimum wage. I never hear anyone else say it and I’m glad I found this.
If you build your business and your bonus on the backs of others who you don’t pay a living wage you don’t deserve to be in business.
this is making capitalists bleed from the ears keep reblogging it
Since I tend to get into this with people who argue that robots will replace minimum wage workers if they get too expensive, I like to lean into the robot metaphor.
If you have a machine performing a valuable talk for your company, the upkeep of that machine is part of your operating cost. You have to pay to power it, to upgrade it, to fix it when it breaks. And if you can’t afford the machine, the manufacturer doesn’t have to do business with you. They’re free to take their service somewhere else where they think the price is fair.
For humans, a living wage is the operating cost. If you can’t afford to pay your worker enough to live nearby, feed themselves, and get basic health care – all of which are things they need in order to be able to work for you – you’re failing to pay for the cost of their service.
The difference is that humans have to eat, like, all the time, so they often don’t have the option of taking their business somewhere else if the price isn’t fair – even insufficient food and shelter is better then starving on the street. But that means those people are not really able to act as agents in a free market, and it’s easy to exploit them under the guise of “the market setting the price.” People can’t act like reasonable economic agents when they’re desperate. As for as I can tell, that’s the whole point of having a minimum wage.
Keep reblogging this, it’s making capitalists mad and reaching out to the working class
“With so nimble a mind, Estel, there is little doubt that you shall win great favor by picking gifts as apt as this one for your future allies. It has been long since I have seen the bright berries and dark leaves of Eregion, the Land of Holly. I had heard they had nearly died out in that land, fading, like many things.
Will I remember? They were my daughter’s delight, in her childhood when the first stones of Ost-in-Edhil were laid amid our cottages in the wilds before the gate of Khazad-dum of old. She loved them because they were bright even in the dark of winter, and under the snow. Fitting, for her! But no doubt you have heard many a tale of her in your old home. But I remember clearest when she was still mine. My husband and I do not sit remembering often, now. Happy! Too happy and too busy to dwell unduly upon what was lost to me, my brothers, my cousins, my teacher. Each day different from the last, each day my lord and I began a new work, each day the stones of our towers reached higher, each day our daughter brought us some new pleasure of parenthood that we could not have imagined, and our family and home and people grew together all at once. Do you know what delight it is to build a home of your own? Perhaps you shall, in the north kingdom: my granddaughter must know it in her span of time.
Time! Time was different then. How fast did my daughter grow! How fast our city! Our works, and our arts! How busy was my family! Curious – things changed so much, so fast that the time never dragged, yet never did it slip by unnoticed as it does now. So much was done that the time seemed much more full than it seems now, yet it weighed one down so little. Curious – that the holly remains little changed all the year, yet in my memory never does it seem to stand so still as the falling golden leaves.”
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