I’m working on two different projects at the moment, one about poison, the other about colonial America, so I’ve been reading a lot about tobacco.By the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Jamestown colonists figured out how to grow… Read More
Yesterday I drove to Ithaca, New York, where I met up with Mary Smith, Professor of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine maintains a poisonous plants garden, which makes sense, if you think about it. Veterinary … Read More
In 1495, an epidemic of syphilis spread from Naples across Europe. (It probably reached Europe from the New World by way of Columbus’s ships.) The English called it the French pox. The French called it the English pox.