Quote:
Originally Posted by BookCat
At that time, wasn't arsenic also in many 'remedies' and beauty products, as well as yellow and green wallpaper (I always thought the woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" was suffering from poisoning)? This would have given them a certain resistance to it: if you take small doses of arsenic regularly, the lethal dose is higher. But there were many other possible poisons. James Tully, the writer of "The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte" thinks it was agrimony, if I remember correctly.
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And medicines like Laudanum were commonplace. According to Wikipedia laudanum contains almost all of the opium alkaloids, including morphine and codeine. I can imagine the danger of accidental overdose with it is great since (according to Wikipedia) Overdose and death may occur with a single oral dose of between 100 and 150 mg of morphine in a healthy adult who is not habituated to opiates. And back then such things might well be covered up by a family for fear of the stigma of people thinking that the family member was a suicide, even if it was an accidental overdose.