Word: poisonous
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...have a dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear as will disperse itself through all plays that the unbeaten Crusaders may fall dead, and that the Gil Fenerty may be discharged of yards as violently as hasty passes fir'd doth hurry from Peter Muldoon's fatal cannon...
...ingredients are a large New World toad (Bufo marinus) and one or more species of puffer fish. The toad, Davis reports, is a "veritable chemical factory," containing hallucinogens, powerful anesthetics and chemicals that affect the heart and nervous system. The fish is more potent still, containing a deadly nerve poison called tetrodotoxin...
...learn how these poisons might relate to zombiism, Davis turned to an unlikely source: Japanese medical literature. Every year a number of Japanese suffer Botanist Davis tetrodotoxin poisoning as a result of eating incorrectly prepared puffer fish, the great delicacy fugu. Davis found that entire Japanese case histories "read like accounts of zombification." Indeed, nearly every symptom reported by Narcisse and his doctors is described, from the initial difficulty breathing to the final paralysis, glassy-eyed stare and yet the retention of mental faculties. In at least two cases, Japanese victims were declared dead but recovered before they could...
Davis has sent samples of the zombie potion to laboratories in Europe and the U.S., where in one experiment it induced a trancelike state in rats. Such research in the past led to the discovery of curare, an arrow poison from the Amazon now used to paralyze muscles during surgery. Tetrodotoxin may also one day find its place in the medical armamentarium. "People who have lived in the tropics for centuries have learned things about plants and animals that we have not fathomed," says Richard Evan Schultes, head of Harvard's renowned Botanical Museum. "We must not leave...
...ambitions, it now does not look so certain," they told Garland two years before the flags were to be set fluttering at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Coupled with the sour economic situation was a darkening political climate. Adolf Hitler, who was not yet in power but spreading his poison in Germany nonetheless, succeeded in blocking funds to send German competitors abroad: good Germans, he said, should not be mixing with foreigners...