The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul

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.