Poison

“Poison is in everything and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy” (Paracelsus, quoted by Cuthbert 2001: 548). The permeable boundary between poison and medicine (seemedicine and the gothic) is reflected in the indeterminacy of Jacques Derrida's reading of Plato's use ofpharmakonas poison or cure (1981: 117–19). Less ambiguous was the use of hemlock for state executions, as in the case of Socrates, by the ancient Greeks, who attributed poisonous plants to Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. The earliest texts on poison were by the Greek herbalist Nicander, who was the main source of toxicology until the Renaissance. By then, Magister Sautes de Ardoynis in hisThe Book of Venoms(1424) was listing as poisons: aconite, leopard's gall, mandrake, opium, and even menstrual blood, which according to twentieth‐century pseudo‐science contained meno‐toxins.