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@rose-colored-fancy

Sorry I took so long to make a reply. Life has been crazy, and sadly this response will be a bit less exhaustive than I’d like. Thankfully, Ms. Ryddle here has also chimed in with her own good sense and research, to which I shall add with my own obscure knowledge of how people die. 😛

Poisons have a huuuuuge variety of mechanisms of action by which they kill you. However, as far as natural poisons go,  whether animal or plant, there are two general ways:

1) Neurotoxin – most common to animal venom (i.e., snakes and spiders), but there’s a couple plants with neurotoxic effects – many of which are also used for medicinal purposes (just not in lethal doses). Both drugs and poisons in this category affect nerve transmissions and muscle contractions, and therefore most prominently the muscles of the heart and lungs. And when these stop working, you die. 

Like, now.

The main takeaway (and unfortunately for realism) is that direct neurotoxins usually kill you within minutes or hours, before there’s time to diagnose the unknown poison and administer the antidote. However, if you know the poison (e.g., water hemlock [treated with charcoal]) then these agents can often be treated with an antidote to reverse their effects before the patient bites it.

Examples include aconite (from monkshood/Wolfbane), botulinum (botox), belladonna, tetrodotoxin, and strychnine, among many, many others.

2) Shock – this is a broad category, but this includes classic substances like Spanish Fly, cyanide, ricin, arsenic, antimony – notice the heavy metals on the list? These substances don’t have a direct effect on the nervous system, but cause the breakdown of other body systems which are rather critical to sustained life. Everything I just mentioned except cyanide directly attacks the GI system, causing irritation – a medical euphemism for causing your intestinal lining to split open and bleed into your abdominal cavity. The “shock” part is a bit of a mess; in some poisons, it comes from huge losses of circulating blood volume. In others, such as cyanide, it is because the body is dying on a cellular level due to lack of energy (as cyanide paralyzes the mitochondria, preventing your cells from making the energy they need to live).

These poisons often kill somewhat slower, but that is not always the case – and even so, you’re looking at a difference more of a few hours instead of a few minutes, or potentially a day. It is also important to note that there’s significant overlap between these two mechanisms of action, and most poisons work in both ways to some degree.

The main causes of a long, slow death are a combination of low dose / low concentration and old age – OR low dose and constant administration.

Not because old age allows you to survive poison better, but because with old age, the person cannot survive the lesser damage caused by a more moderate dose, and ends up dying not directly of the poison, but of complications from the poison.

As for the latter, that is the sort of assassination technique one might use when trying to dispatch someone without it being known that they were poisoned. Even in the medieval period, it was pretty easy to tell the difference between poison and disease (unless you waited for the person to get sick of some regular cold before slipping them some good ole “herbal tea”). The most reliable poisons killed you far too quickly, and so it would be immediately known that an assassination attempt had been made once the victim (or their cupbearer) bought the farm (not that this was much consolation to the victim, but it would make it hard for the assassin or their employer to make good on the murder – at least if the murdered was reasonably popular.)

The more subtle way would be to poison the victim gradually with small doses of mild poison to cause general illness and sickliness over a period of weeks or months. The doses wouldn’t necessarily have to be constant or regular, just every few days, randomized so that the victim doesn’t know what’s making them sick, and therefore is more likely to believe that he just caught the plague or something. You could even use very, very dilute arsenic exposure over a long period to cause jaundice and rashes, which would lead to most people assuming it to be a health condition rather than a poison – especially if your victim is particularly fat (jaundice, gout, and obesity go hand in hand).

 

Just some ideas. When my exams are over I can come back and answer again in greater, more thoroughly researched detail.