The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul - Eleanor Herman

Written by Eleanor Herman
Read by Susie Berneis
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC
Release date: July 31, 2018
Duration: 10:31:06

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 mercury and lead. Men rubbed turds on their bald spots.

Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings, and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. The most gorgeous palaces were little better than filthy latrines. Gazing at gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes.

Some reviews…However, before you begin reading this book, if you have a weak stomach, proceed with caution. It’s a wonder civilization ever survived to this point considering the filth people lived in, even those who were powerful and wealthy. The subject matter is often truly disgusting. So, consider yourself warned.

This book was absolutely disgusting and I loved every minute of it. What a weird sentence, right?

The forensics are fascinating, and the wealth of knowledge and the obvious amount of effort and work done here is impressive. The author, however, does not merely present the facts and lay out her verdict via modern day studies, and exhumations, but she also injects humor and wry sarcasm so that the book occasionally carries a lighter tone, which also works to prevent the book from being overly dry.

With dramatic timing, narrator Susie Berneis enthralls and disgusts with a thorough look at how poisons were used to beautify, maim, and kill kings, queens, mistresses, and children. This audiobook recounts stories of how this was done and who did it. Berneis’s rhythm is so dramatic that listeners almost expect to hear a drumroll at the end of her delivery. Many times doctors’ treatments left patients worse off or killed them. Cosmetics, a favorite with the wealthy and the royals, were made from lead and at the very least made people ill or in the extreme killed them. Admittedly, the subject is gruesome, but Berneis’s performance savors the humor and keeps the subject from devolving into the macabre. E.E.S. � AudioFile 2018,

This was fun to edit, a great read.