The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul - Review and Author Q&A

The Royal Art of Poison:  Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, And Murder Most Foul

By Eleanor Herman
release date 6/12/2018
Chapter length: short
4 out of 5 stars

I received a free copy of this eBook from St. Martin's Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  The opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

According to the publisher:  "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 and the stench of unwashed bodies; the lice feasting on private parts; and worms nesting in the intestines.

In The Royal Art of Poison, Eleanor Herman combines her unique access to royal archives with cutting-edge forensic discoveries to tell the true story of Europe’s glittering palaces: one of medical bafflement, poisonous cosmetics, ever-present excrement, festering natural illness, and, sometimes, murder."

I am not hugely into nonfiction, but this is among the very best that I have ever read!  The Royal Art of Poison is a perfect combination of scientific and historical information intertwined with fantastically dramatic accounts of royal intrigue and deception.  While I felt that I was reading stories that had to be straight out of a soap opera, I was actually learning a lot!  At times this book was not for the faint of heart, but reading through the moments of guts and gore was so worth it to hear all of these incredible and true stories.  If you like science, history, or drama, you will love this book!

The people at St. Martin's Press were kind enough to give me the opportunity to do a Q&A with the author. Keep reading to see what Eleanor Herman had to say about her fantastic new book!


How did you first become interested in this topic?

Years ago, researching royal European courts for my other books, Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen, I was surprised at how every time someone died—even if they had been sick for months— people thought it was poison. I wondered if it really was poison or if it was natural illness that doctors of the time couldn’t diagnose. It might make an interesting subject for a book at some point, I decided, and I finally got around to doing it. It was fun writing this book because it combined my love of European history with my passion for true crime shows!

What was your strategy for doing research?  Were you able to do it all from home or was any travel involved?

I did it all from home. Bear in mind, I’ve been to just about every palace still standing. And these days, there is a wealth of research at our fingertips online. Here is an example of a home recipe book printed in 1595 calling for ingredients of mercury, arsenic, sulfur, lead to improve one’s health and beauty, including a mercury face mask you were supposed to leave on for eight days! I printed every page out and read it, shocked, horrified, and amazed.

Of the historical figures included in your book, which was your favorite?

I was greatly impressed by Edward VI, Henry VIII’s son who died at fifteen in 1553. Studious, polite, athletic, he would have made a fine king, I believe, and his final illness was nothing short of martyrdom, which he handled with patience and grace. I also loved learning more about Mozart and Napoleon. We always hear about what they did rather than who they were, and both were truly remarkable human beings. Mozart put up with the most obnoxious, interfering father with a resigned obedience I could not have mustered. He worked so hard to rise in the cutthroat musical field where the odds were stacked against him despite his breathtaking talent. Napoleon as a young officer helped French nobles escape the guillotine! He was very modern in seeing that Jews and people of African descent should be fully equal citizens and invented the house numbering system we use all over the world—odd on one side, even on the other. One of my favorite things about writing is that I learned so much I didn’t know before and feel much richer because of it.

Was there anything really cool that you came across in your research that didn't make it into the book?

I wanted to include some information on ancient Roman poisoning—members of the Julio-Claudian imperial family dropping dead at banquets, and the use of plant-based poisoning such as hemlock, mushrooms, and wolfsbane, but it didn’t make it into the final edit.

 Favorite period of history?

The Renaissance and the Roman Empire; periods of great fashion, exploration, and sophistication, though the Romans were a lot cleaner. They had toilets with running water, hot baths, and doctors who washed their hands and surgical instruments! The Renaissance royal courts, as I now know, were truly filthy and disgusting.

Are there any historical figures that you believe were poisoned, despite it not being confirmed?

There are questions about the death of the founder of Russian communism, Vladimir Lenin. When he died in 1924, he had had several strokes. But he seemed to be recovering nicely when a friend of Joseph Stalin visited him and then, two hours later, he had convulsions—a symptom more in line with poisoning than with stroke—and died. The Soviet government ordered that no toxicology tests be performed during the autopsy. Stalin, too, may have been poisoned instead of suffering a stroke as was reported. His initial autopsy report indicated extensive stomach bleeding, not a symptom of stroke but of Warfarin, a tasteless medication that is poisonous in high doses. All mention of stomach bleeding was removed in the next autopsy report. A known poisoner who had been a guest at Stalin’s final dinner party later boasted he had poisoned him. And there are a lot of weird contradictory test results surrounding the strange death of Yasser Arafat, possibly from polonium-210.

If you lived in the heyday of poisonings, what method would you have used to protect yourself?

The unicorn horn, definitely. I would wave it over everything I was going to eat or drink and study it to make sure it wasn’t sweating or trembling—a sure sign of poison!

 Do you have any future plans to dive deeper into this topic?

I think The Royal Art of Poison is the definitive book on this subject, but I am fascinated by crime and murder, especially in the days before DNA, fingerprints, photographs, and ID, so I might come back in the general direction!

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