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America’s First Serial Killers and Many More Deadly Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan September 6, 2020 35 min

Train - Train robbery — History's first peacetime passenger train robbery. CBS News

27. The Perfect Poison

A seventeenth-century vial, with an image of St. Nicholas of Bari – the type of vial in which Aqua Tofana was sold. Mega Curioso

Aqua Tofana was slow-acting once ingested and produced symptoms that mimicked death from natural causes, such as those of a steadily progressing disease. The first dose produced symptoms similar to those of the common cold. A second dose and the symptoms progressed to those of a nasty flu. A third dose, and the victim was seriously ill, complaining of a stomachache, suffering from diarrhea, dehydration, and throwing up. A fourth dose would finish the job.

From the user’s perspective, Aqua Tofana was the perfect poison, that almost guaranteed the perfect crime. Given the state of medical knowledge back then, Tofana’s deadly concoction was virtually undetectable in postmortem examinations. Moreover, the symptoms resembled the stages of a steadily advancing illness. That was the perfect cover in an era when so many routinely fell ill and died for reasons that physicians could not readily explain.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.