They claimed small lumps of arsenic, crushed between their teeth and swallowed, improved their complexion, made their hair strong and glossy and helped them breathe easier at high altitude or when doing strenuous work. In the middle of the 19 th century stories emerged of people in Styria eating arsenic for their health. Had one of the two characters eating Sayers’s poisoned meal been inspired by the Persian king and been dosing himself with small amounts of arsenic to give him immunity? Much of Mithridates’s life is the stuff of legend but added to more contemporary accounts of ‘arsenic-eaters’ a credible hypothesis begins to take shape. They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt: To protect himself, Mithridates devised a concoction of over fifty toxins which he sampled daily to develop a tolerance to all poisons. The last verse tells of King Mithridates, who was terrified of being poisoned. Although Sayers does not explicitly tell the reader which poem Wimsey has been reading, a later reference to Mithridates seems to indicate that one poem in the collection had particularly caught the detective’s attention: Terence, This is Stupid Stuff. Houseman in conjunction with three other more technical tomes. The key to the whole mystery comes to Sayers’s amateur detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, when he reading A Shropshire Lad, by A. How can arsenic kill one person but not another? But there are no chinks in the armour, no moment unaccounted for if one person ate poison during the meal then so did the other person. Every aspect of the deadly meal is gone into: who ate what, who drank what, who was present, and if any poison could have been surreptitiously slipped into one plate of food but not the other. Sayers has been criticised for her detailed explanations of everything from advertising to campanology, and sometimes it might seem as if she is merely showing off her knowledge rather than advancing the plot, but it is the detail that makes Strong Poison a success. The central mystery of Strong Poison is how two people can sit down for a meal and eat exactly the same things but one of them dies of arsenic poisoning while the other is unaffected. But much of this would have been known toher readers: Sayers’s new take on an old poison is what makes her novel a classic. It certainly gave Sayers the opportunity to show off her comprehensive knowledge of the poison, from details of how to obtain it, administer it and detect it, to name dropping real-life arsenic poisoners. It is the almost too obvious choice for the murder mystery writer and so it is surprising that Sayers, an inventive plotter, would pick something so commonplace. If not, find another station and try again.Arsenic is almost a by-word for poisoning its easy availability from the 19th century to well into the 20th century, and symptoms resembling gastric conditions or food poisoning, made it a popular choice with poisoners. If it works, it'll say connected successfully. Copy / paste the name into the app's Station ID field and click 'test'. That should bring up a page for that station which has the station ID name listed. Simply look at the map on the WU website for stations around you and click on one close by. Not all stations will be accessible (likely due to the owner's access preferences) but with a little trial and error i found a few that worked for me. I couldn't get the station search to work via the app, but that was easily fixed by going to the WU website and finding stations around my location. You just have to set it up in the app preferences. Basically, this is designed to connect to your own personal weather station, but allows you to log into other WU stations on the network if you know the station name. I've got Weather Underground on my iPhone & iPad, but was disappointed to not see a corresponding app for Mac OS - until I found this. Awesome - works with Weather Underground!
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