For centuries, the royal treatment for European kings, queens, and princes might well include a dose of poison added to their victuals. In the hopes of avoiding this, they employed various means to counteract or prevent their demise. Servants were forced to lick the royal family’s spoons, don their undergarments, and test their chamber pots, while antidotes were tested on condemned prisoners. Ironically, the elites often unwittingly poisoned themselves through their cosmetics, medications, and extremely unsanitary living conditions.
Historian Eleanor Herman shares her research on the eras when mercury ointment was slathered on the body to cure rashes, dead birds applied to the head and feet of sick people to draw out evil humors, and arsenic and quicksilver rubbed on the head and armpits to eliminate lice. She traces even more perilous potions and royal schemes employed up to modern times.
Herman has hosted “Lost Worlds” for the History Channel, “The Madness of Henry VIII” for National Geographic Channel, and is filming her second season of “America: Fact vs. Fiction” on American Heroes Channel. Her book The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine and Murder Most Foul (St. Martin’s Press) is available for sale and signing after the program.
Smithsonian Connections
You didn’t need to be royal to worry about accidental poisonings—or live in centuries long past. Before the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, American women could find beauty products on their drugstore shelves that promised longer lashes or more beautiful skin, but delivered a deadly dose of poisonous chemicals in the process. Smithsonian.com takes a look at some of these now-horrifying cosmetics.
