The English word "poison", first used around the early 14th
century, meant "dose" and indeed dose were the days when a
favourite method of getting rid of people who stood in your way
or who had something you coveted was to poison them. Take the
case of Pope Alexander VI, the patriarch of the notorious Borgia
family. He appointed rich men as Bishops and Cardinals,
encouraged them to become wealthier and then invited them to
dine with his family which included his daughter Lucrezia who,
like the invitation, had a hollow ring. Hers, however, had a
mechanism that allowed her to release poison into a glass of
wine. According to Cathy Newman in a National Geographic article
"Twelve Toxic Tales": "The house wine, dry, with overtones of
arsenic neatly dispatched the guests, whose wealth, by church
law, then reverted to their host." In other words, Lucrezia
proved lucrative. Poison was first used around 4500 BC to kill
animals and later the Romans used it for assassination. The
National Geographic article listed sever