Nightmist introduced us to ramie fibre as Word of the Day a few days ago. Coincidentally, I looked at a newish book (by Victoria Blake) about the Maybrick Poisoning Case today.
Mrs Maybrick was convicted of poisoning her husband with arsenic and spent 15 years in jail. From what Blake writes, it seems very unlikely it was intentional. The two of them were obsessed with arsenic. They used it for flypaper, rat (or on some accounts cat) poison, she used it in home-made cosmetics, and he took it as a tonic. (The stuff does in fact give some people an energy buzz in low doses, and his description makes it seem like Red Bull). He couldn't find a doctor willing to prescribe it, so he bought it on false pretences from pharmacists. One handy excuse was that it was used for processing ramie (then new on the market) and so that was what he told one pharmacist he was going to do with it. When he died, their house was found to contain "enough arsenic to poison a regiment".
There's a lot about the Maybrick case on the web. I can't find anything about ramie processing with arsenic, though.
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