Note 230 — MINERAL POISONS.

A belief in this mode of poisoning appears to be of very ancient origin. Calpurnius Bestia was said by Pliny (Hist. Nat. Lib. 27. Cap. 2.) to have been particularly skilled in such a process, and to have murdered many of his wives when asleep, by bathing the parts of generation with the juice of Aconite; and Dr. Gordon Smith, in his work on Forensic Medicine, relates, on the authority of Schenckius, the tragical death of Ladislas, or Lancelot, surnamed the Victorious and the Liberal, who succeeded to the contested throne of Naples in 1386, and died at the age of thirty-eight in great pain, in consequence of having been poisoned by the daughter of a physician, of whom he was passionately fond, per concubitum. Sir Thomas Brown, in his Vulgar Errors, alludes to an ancient story of an “Indian king that sent unto Alexander a fair woman, fed with Aconites, and other poisons, with the intent that she either by converse or copulation might destroy him.”