h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Classical Poison Homicide - A4024612
Author: Farlander with no K - Hitman: Blood Money out in June! - U206300

I was becoming increasingly annoyed by the unavailability of articles about poisons to link to every time I mentioned 'cyanide' and 'arsenic' in conjunction with microbes and medicine; I ultimately decide to take matters into my own hands by writing my own concise guide to the classical poisons.

Unfortunately, in this case 'concise' is defined as 'what every Farlander project starts out as'. It began as a guide to ancient poisons and their symptoms of poisoning ('Classical Poisons'), then mutated into an article about ancient poisons and infamous people who used them ('Famous Poisons and Poisoners'). And then the history section hypertrophied... and I no longer know what to call the blasted article.

Recognising the absurd length of the article, I refuse to make more than a passing mention of curare, poisonous mushrooms and modern poisons on the grounds that further addition to the article would cause me - and the dear reader - to go mad.

Um, comments, suggestions, notifications of typos... anything? Thanks, and apologies in advance.

Well, I haven't had time to read all of this, so I can't make any suggestions w.r.t. the title yet. However, as you say, it is absurdly long and I'm sure you'll be asked to split it up.

Some small points which I noticed:

"Other cyanide-based poisons include prussic acid, Scheele's acid....'

Well, I don't think you mentioned what the original cyanide is; is it 0potassium cyanide or hydrogen cyanide? If the latter, then prussic aciud is hydrogen cyanide.

Sir William Crokes > Sir William Crookes

In one place you talk of ricin "supposedly" being used to murder Gyorgi Markov and yet later say thart is was (by elimination) assumed to be the murder agent. In fact, I'm sure that chemists from CBDE Porton Down PROVED IT WAS RICIN USING AN ELISA assay. Also, the volume available in the spherical pellet was used to calculate the maximum mass of poison which could've been used - which eliminated conventional inorganic and organic poisons and lefyt only biologicval toxins.

In fact, that might be a useful way to subdivide your work. I once saw a bar chart (in New Scientist, I think, which showed the ranges of LD50's for these 3 classes of poisons - and there were clear orders of magnitude differences between each class.

Hope this helps.

PS By coincidence I've just been reading a book review of 'The Elements of Murder' by John Emsley (eminent chemist)

You don't mention the fact that Napoleon believed he had been murdered and, indeed, his hair contains a high concentration of As On his death bed he testified that he'd been 'murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassin'. However, in fact the As came from the As compound contained in the green dye on his wallpaper - released due to the action of moulds/fungi in the damp conditions of his house on St Helena.

w.r.t thallium: Apparently thallium sulphate featured in a plot to murder Nelson Mandela and it was the preferred murder weapon for disposing of Saddam Hussein's dissidents.

By rights, I shouldn't have time to read your Entry in detail until at lewast next weekend when all the 'A' level coursework I'm marking needs to be sent off. But, although the spirit is willing the flesh is weak...

PPS the book review says that possibly the most famous As poisoning case concerns Florence Maybrick, an adultress who repeatedly dosed her husband James with As before managing to administer a fatal amount, In 1889, she was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved two weaks later and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
Depicted as a martyr by women's rightrs organisations, nio fewer than 3 U.S. presidents tried to intervene on her behalf.

PPPS I knew I had s'thing else in mind - w.r.t. 'What is a poison', don't forget the view of Paracelsus that 'the definition of a poison is in its dose'. i.e. everything can be a poison, it just depends how much of it you take. e.g. As in an essential element to life - at very low doses.

This isn't an entry, this a University project! What a pity the University of Life is defunct

This may be "absurdly long" - and I agree, but it's the most concise entry I've ever read.

I can imagine it will be split up, and I don't think I've ever seen so many (53) footnotes (except on Niwt's PS)

I can't imagine that anything has been omitted, if there is, I'll be surprised.



Well done.

Wow - great read - there's a book in this one.

Loved it - though a warning for the faint-hearted should perhaps be inserted -

Couple of errors I picked up on the way through - firstly Neil Cream seems to have started his fscination with the deadlier species very young. According to the dates given 1977 - 1892 he was only 15 when he died, and had already spent 10 years in jail. I did think these dates might refer to his time in England but....

Also this sentence "Alas for her, the country's attitude towards homeopathy took a plunge shortly after their marriage, and the country hit financial depression (for which Grover Cleveland." Seems to be missing a section.

All in all a great read, the only suggestion I might make for additions would be the most prolific poisoner of modern times Dr. (Hell of a lot of doctors in here aren't there ?) Harold Shipman.

Eargh! I can see where I made the grammatical error. The 'supposed' bit was supposed to refer to the Bulgarian secret service and not the poison, ricin (on account of how the extent of the B secret service's involvement was never satisfactorily demonstrated). I'll go re-word that... somehow. Thanks. It's cyanogenic glycosides in plants, but I was referring to both potassium cyanide (electroplating) and hydrocyanic acid in the article. Although I've heard of 'prussic acid' once or twice, I must confess I never actually realised that *that* was the common name for HCN [embarrassed look]... That's what you get for having been educated in science (and just about every other subject) in a language other than English (I'll tell you another day how long it took me to realise that 'kalium' was 'potassium' ).

Thanks again!

Incidentally, w.r.t. Scheele's 'acid' - the wallpaper in Napoleon's bedroom was died with Scheele's green (copper arsenite). Napoleon and his staff lived on St Helena for 6 years and both he and his staff complained of bad health, blaming the house's chronic dampness for their ailments. They could've been right because the damp encouraged mould which converts the dye to volatile trimethylarsine.

Napoleon's hair still exists and neutron activation analysis shows As levels 13 X higher than normal. (However, I've got a letter published in New Scientist from a guy who was involved in the analysis of Boney's hair. He says the "trace amounts present at the time of his deatg" could've been due to the tartar emetic medication he was receiving at the time (Nature, 1982; vol 299 p627).

Thanks for going through this, everyone!

@McKay: The 'years' refer to the years the murders were committed, not the murderers' lifespans. (by your reasoning, Crippen & co. would've been 1 year old when they committed murder...). Um... maybe I should've made that clearer? The missing text is 'was blamed'. Yeah, I was gonna put Shipman in, but I didn't want people like Z thinking I was attacking people in the medical profession. I'll see, though, if I can make a short enough chronicle of his crimes...

@RBigAl: I *was* wondering just who said that the dose made the poison (which I mentioned earlier on in the article); all I could remember was the quote and not the person. Thanks!

@Oojakapiv: You've got a point there.

Cheers,
Far.

I must admit, this entry is SO big I haven't really read it thoroughly, just the bits that I knew about already, such as Graham Young's exploits. To which I would add that there was a vey good film made about it: The Young Poisoner's Handbook, which gives a pretty accruate account of his activities.

Farlander,

This entry is far too long. The guidelines say:

"Write Entries of Appropriate Length

We are not necessarily looking for long entries, just well-researched, well-balanced, well-written ones. We've found that Researchers are much more likely to read entries and comment on them if it's possible to read them in one sitting. As a general guide, it's usually difficult to adequately cover a topic in less than 250 words, but if your entry is getting a bit lengthy (1000 words or more), you might consider splitting it into smaller sub-topics or indicate whereabouts the entry should be divided up into separate entries."

I have no intention of reading it until you've done the work of splitting it up into sections. Each section should form a complete entry that stands on its own. As it is, your entry is NOT the sort of thing we are looking for here in h2g2.

I have to agree: as an experiment, I pasted the text into Word. 18000 words and 39 pages later...

*Nobody* is going to read this in its entirity. This is not to say it's a bad entry, but it doesn't appear to be fit-for-purpose. Quite what you should do with such a huge subject I don't know.

...although it would be very useful for destruction-testing GuideDog, if I ever get around to finishing it...

Ouch.

Noted, with thanks. Sections clearly separated, but was unwilling to physically split up article because I didn't know how to keep them connected (ie. linking - it happened with another article set where the links wound up going to the normal guide entries), and because I thought they might belong together better. Have acted upon your advice at any rate, and separated them into three articles, and have withdrawn the complete one from PR. Thanks again.

Well - myself, Oojakpiv, BigAL, and Galaxy Babe all read it from start to end, and most of us found an error, omission or typo. I'd say this seriously disrupts the arguement that nobody could read it.

I think the subject works well as a single entry - 'length should be appropriate' - Hmmm shall we go with 'Mostly Dangerous' for a descripttion of poisons then ?

"Well - myself, Oojakpiv, BigAL, and Galaxy Babe all read it from start to end..."

Well, to be honest, I just skimmed it, and then picked out some areas that were of particular interest to me. As I said, really I shouldn';t have time to read it until I've finished marking 'A' Level coursework, but...

I'm perfectly capable of reading it from start to finish. That doesn't change the fact that it was too long. There is a terrible trend towards long entries here on h2g2, which we must do our best to eradicate. Otherwise we'll end up as an encyclopaedia that no-one will read.

Mostly Dangerous!!! That would certainly make a *great* title - if I were writing a one-person treatise on homicide and other unnatural ways to die! Alas, I would probably go insane or blind (whichever comes first) from trying to carry out such a project.

Well, I still have the article in its original form (I saved it before chopping it up), so if the majority feels that the three-entry article still works better as a single... er, article, it wouldn't take much to put it back together as one.