The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman – An Audio Book Review

The story of poison is the story of power….

For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners.

Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications and filthy living conditions.

Women wore makeup made with lead. Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner.

The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political – and cosmetic – tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.

Author: Eleanor Herman

Narrator: Joan Walker

Publisher: QUEST from W.F. Howes Ltd

Audio Release Date: July 4th 2019

Genre: Non-Fiction

Running Time: 10hrs 3mins (286 pages on Kindle)

My Rating of ‘The Royal Art of Poison’: 5 out of 5

Purchase: Audible, Amazon

Review:

This book did so much in under three hundred pages.

Within these pages you will find a detailed history on not only the act of poisoning, but the unfounded suspicion of it, the misdiagnosed ailments leading the ‘founded’ suspicion of it and the ways in which people of the past poisoned themselves without ever knowing they were doing it.

We learn of high-profile individuals from royal courts across Europe, of non-royal personages such as Michelangelo or Mozart, and even get a run-down on modern day poisoning that’s employed by certain countries/the men that lead them.

The thing I took away from this above all else, was that although dying via being poisoned was incredibly common in the annals of history, the act of maliciously poisoning people wasn’t as common as I had originally suspected, nor as Hollywood or pop-culture books would have us believe. The main reason for death via poison in times past was through medicine, cosmetic products, the improper use of harmful substances (arsenic being used to make literally anything and everything in the colour green during the Victorian period) and, quite simply, dreadful hygiene.

There are so many cases throughout history where exhumed corpses were found to have lethal amounts of mercury in their body, but through willingly taking it as a cure for a variety of medical ailments rather than having it slipped into their morning tea. The same can be said for a host of other poisons and toxins.

The book rounds off with a hall of fame of poisons, denoting which cause the most pain, which cause the least, where a variety of them came from, the effects on the human body etc …

All in all this book is a fascinating look at times gone past. It covers, in good detail, the history of medicine, politics and basic sanitation. It’s a fun, informative book that I would highly recommend to anyone whose interests stray into that area. It’s certainly a must for anyone who enjoys a bit of true crime, or has filled their reading lists with old thrillers revolving around plotlines dripping with poisons and toxins.

The narration was incredibly good. Joan Walker’s work made it a joy to listen to.