Response to letter to the Editor regarding 'A note on Conium maculatum L., the plant that defeated Alexander the Great' in Clinical Toxicology 2014: (doi: 10.3109/15563650.2013.870341)

摘要

We thank Wiart for his interest in our paper in which we put forward our hypothesis for the cause of Alexander the Great's death.1 Wiart challenges our conclusion, "If Alexander the Great was poisoned, Veratrum album offers a more plausible cause than arsenic, strychnine, and other botanical poisons". In our manuscript we investigated the toxicologi-cal properties of a number of botanical poisons known to the ancients and concluded that, based on one account of his death, poisoning by V. album offers the most plausible explanation.