In old plays and stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, poisons are depicted as being fairly fast acting.
Would they really have had access to such poison, or was it simply creative license? What would a realistic depiction of a poison of that era be?
In old plays and stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, poisons are depicted as being fairly fast acting.
Would they really have had access to such poison, or was it simply creative license? What would a realistic depiction of a poison of that era be?
As you correctly surmised, most poisons wouldn’t act nearly as fast, although there are exceptions. In reality, people would just get very sick for a very long time and perhaps not recover. It would’ve been difficult to even correctly identify poison over illness or food-borne pathogens. I’m willing to bet a lot of people who died of natural causes had their deaths attributed to poison because of their position and lack of medical knowledge as well.
Then again, some poisons and their effects were well-known to contemporary physicians or their forebears, so depending on the precise effects they could possibly deduce what happened in some cases.