Everything Old Is New Again Dept.

     To get a truly broad sense of the insanity rampant throughout our species – a copious supply of evidence to that effect, at any rate – there’s no substitute for a single book: Charls Mackay’s immortal 1852 study Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Today, mindful of this evil, I reproduce a bit of it here, from Mackay’s chapter on “The Slow Poisoners:”

     The vendors [of the poisons] were chiefly women, of whom the most celebrated was a hag named [Giulia] Tophania, who was in this way accessory to the death of upwards of six hundred persons. This woman appears to have been a dealer in poisons from her girlhood, and resided first at Palermo and then at Naples.
     […]
     [Of the Aqua Tophania,] Haltemann the physician, and father of the homeopathic doctrine, writing upon this subject, says it was compounded of arsenical neutral salts, occasioning in the victim a gradual loss of appetite, faintness, gnawing pains in the stomach, loss of strength, and wasting in the lungs. The Abbe Gagliardi says that a few drops of it were generally poured into tea, chocolate, or soup, and that its effects were slow, and almost imperceptible…. Neapolitans called it Aqua toffnia; and it became notorious all over Europe under the name of Aqua Tophania.

     The Viceroy of Naples took note of the multiplication of beautiful young widows – an extraordinary number for a period of general peace – and resolved to act. Ironically, Giulia Tophania had taken refuge in a monastery under a false name, from where she continued to sell her poison! She was eventually discovered, tried, convicted, and put to death.

     Gentlemen, I hardly need to tell you that you cannot read the mind of your Significant Other. You cannot be certain of what she tells you, except for those rare instances in which you can verify her assertions with your own senses. While it’s difficult to procure arsenic these days, there are other substances sold in pharmacies – all of them marked For External Use Only! — that can be compounded into an effective and difficult-to-detect poison. I could tell you how to make one such poison off the top of my head, and there are several others I don’t know how to concoct.

     It’s a terrible thing to have to tell a man not to trust his beloved, but this is the age we live in. Watch her — and yourself.

2 comments

    • SteveF on November 18, 2024 at 12:50 PM

    Virtually all of the harpies pushing this are talking and will never act. However, a few have already acted.

    As feminists love to say about men: It’s all women until it’s no women.

    1. Indeed. Men must now suspect all women, and never let their guard down.

Comments have been disabled.