Waterbury evening Democrat. [volume] (Waterbury, Conn.) 1887-1895, 1893-07-01
ABOUT POISONING.
Once q Fine Art but Now Easy of Oct
ton.

Once q Fine Art but Now Easy of Detee-
ton.
This method of breaking the sixth
commandment is popular with a GER
tain class of miscreants. Men of infer
nal proclivities, but weak nerves, resort
to it as clean and quiet way of get
ting rid of uncongenial wives and
troublesome companions which involves
no noise, no shedding of blood, and is
supposed to be a safer way of putting
out the light of life than such coarse
and abrupt modes of extinguishment as
shooting, throat-cutting, axing and the
like. Women with taste for
homicide, from the time of Nero's
mother to the present day, have
generally preferred poison to
every other instrument of murder. In
the days of the Medicis and the Bor-
gias, poisoning rose to the dignity of a
fine art in Italy. Catherine de Medici,
it is true, was not insensible to the at
fractions of emphatic and wholesale
slaughter witness the tragedy of st.
Bartholomew gotten up under her
direction-but she had cultivated the
art of silent murder with great assiduity
and success, and now and then INDUCED
in a little family practice with infinite
gusto. After leading her son, Charles
the Ninth, by the nose for many years.
she poisoned him through the same
organ. All the Borgias We're also ex-
perts in this branch of demonism.
In the middle ages, however, poison
was much safer weapon than it is
now. Then the most accomplished
chemists of the world manufactured it
for the worst purposes The man of
cience who had produced a new and
subtle philter, warranted to kill with
out convulsing, was sure to obtain a
splendid douceur for his secret from
some prince or noble or lady of high
degree, who, to use the classic language
of a modern murderess, wanted to cook
somebody's goose" But nowadays
these things are not managed as they
were in the Medicean and Borgian eras.
There were no post-mortem examina-
tions in the olden time. All the re-
sources of chemistry We're then directed
to the destruction of life, and never, as
at present, to the detection of the means
by which it was destroyed.
1t is next to impossible for modern
poisoner to evade punishment. The
symptoms which follow the admins
tration of all deadly drugs and chemic-
/
| profession. Analysis, like an avenging
| Nemesis, confrontS the pcrpctrat ton
| with the proof of his crime. The stom,
ach of the dead victim is a more potent
witness against the criminal than spec
tiers We're supposed to be against the
| secret men of blood four hundred
| years ago. We need no "choughs ana
magotpies" to bring the deed of tn,
| poisonmongcr to light. The flesh, moi
the ghost, of the dead appears from the
| grave, and consigns him to the gallows
But in spite of the perils. almost un
escapable, with which science has sur
rounded the crime of poisoning, it is
as our criminal records too fearfully
show, on the increase. Recently ther,
has been what the police call run
of it, and we can think of no metho,
better adapted to check its progress
than that of showing it to be, as ii real
ly is, more easy and more certain of de
lection than almost any other variet,
of murdcr.-N. Y. Ledger.