Borgia, Lucrezia

Alkaloids were known in ancient times because they are easy to extract from plants and some of them have powerful and deadly effects. Any plant contains millions of chemical compounds, but some plants, like the deadly nightshade, can be mashed up and extracted with aqueous acid to give a few compounds soluble in that medium, which precipitate on neutralization. These compounds were seen to be like alkali and Meissner, the apothecary from Halle, in 1819 named them alkaloids . Lucrezia Borgia already knew all about this and put the deadly nightshade extract atropine in her eyes (to make her look beautiful atropine dilates the pupils) and in the drinks of her... 

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