times we read that Euripides lost his wife and two 
daughters thus, an assertion unsupported by any ancient 
text, apparently based on a misreading of Athenaeus. 
We read that Pope Clement VII—he who is remem- 
bered chiefly for his tribulations with Henry VIII of 
England—was a victim of poisonous mushrooms. This 
Pontiff died on September 25, 1534. The date falls in 
the season of the deadly amanita, but the records show 
that Clement’s symptoms first manifested themselves 
many months earlier, on May 80, and the course of his 
fluctuating illness from that moment is well documented. 
We discover in the record no trace of the telltale syn- 
drome. As his biographer Emmanuel Rodocanachi sagely 
observes, ‘In accordance with the custom of those times, 
people attributed his death to poison.’ ' 
Then there was the case of the Holy Roman Emperor 
Charles VI, father of Maria Theresa of Austria. He had 
been worried and run down. ‘On the 10th { of October 
1740] at night his complaint was increased by an indi- 
gestion, occasioned by a dish of mushrooms stewed in 
oil, of which he ate voraciously.” So wrote Archdeacon 
Wilham Coxe in his History of the House of Austria. 
Ten days later, on October 20, while the doctors were 
still arguing about the diagnosis, he surprised them by 
dying. The clinical details that Coxe supplies to us, in- 
cluding the patient’s sudden death, are compatible with 
poisoning by the deadly amanita; we have only to as- 
sume that the physicians out of a sense of decorum played 
down the unpleasant details of his last illness. There were 
no allegations that the poisoning, if such it was, was de- 
liberate. If fungi were the agent, he is the one important 
personage in modern times thus killed. His end precipi- 
' Histoire de Rome: Les Pontificats d’ Adrien VI et de Clément VII, 
Librarie Hachette, Paris, 1933. See also Ludwig Pastor, The History 
of the Popes, London, 1910, Vol. 10. 
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