The Poison Duel 1#: Introduction September 14, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
The poison duel is a classic of duelling literature. Two men decide to settle a matter of honour using poison as a weapon. Here the exact modality of life and death varies but the basic strategy is as follows: a pill is filled with water, and a second pill is filled with poison (sometimes glasses serve the same purpose); both duellists take a pill at random and wash it down and within three minutes only one is left standing. Why would anyone fight an enemy in this fashion? There are various possibilities. The first is quite simply that by some strange definitions the poison duel is not technically a duel: there is one case of a young southern man (from Louisiana no less) who chose the poison duel because he had promised his father that he would never fight a duel; there is perhaps also here the start of a legal defence ‘I didn’t kill him, he killed himself’. This begs the question of what we should call a poison duel: ‘randomly attained suicide pact’ in management speak? In other cases it is possible that there was such a disparity between the two men, in terms of their fighting ability, that poison was a way of re-establishing parity, at admittedly a terrible cost. Finally, there is the old saw that some men are beneath duelling: a count would not, for instance, offer a local tenant farmer the honour of drawing swords on him. More usually in this situation thrashing would be the correct response. Just possibly a poison duel was away of avoiding the horror of having to fight a man who was, in no way, a social equal? All these points are interesting, of course, but before discussing them too earnestly another problem should be addressed. Did a poison duel ever, in fact, take place? There is a strong case to be made that not a single poison duel was ever fought. Our records of them come from far away places, ‘perhaps forty years ago’ and often involve anonymous fighters or men with strangely generic names: they became popular in the 1880s and 1890s in the English-speaking press. Would anyone have ever been stupid enough to actually put themselves under such a test: most duels in most countries ended with a nick of the sword or a pistol ball graze or, more usually, an embarrassed muffled apology after a gun had failed to fire. In the same way that many suicide attempts are cries for help rather than a genuine attempt to pass beyond; many duels were a burst of testosterone rather than a real attempt to kill someone (though there were certainly a minority of exceptions…). This post and four more to follow trace the insubstantial history of the poison duel back into the early nineteenth century (and beyond).
Beach is always on the look out for unusual weapons for duels: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
The series will go up under the Poison Duels tag.
24 Sept 2014: Andy and Tacitus from Detritus point out that there is a scene in the Princess’ Bride. How could I have forgotten this!!!
25 Feb 2017: Southern Man makes the point that these duels can probably be classified under folklore motif, ‘Ordeal by poison: h223’. Penzer VIII 196 n.; Basset RTP VI 631, VII 278, 616; Irish myth: *Cross; Jewish: Neuman.
