A MODERN BORGIA

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIII, Issue 200, 23 August 1902, Page 5 (Supplement)

A MODERN BORGIA.

JANE TOPPAN, THE POISONER.

Jane Toppan, a New England nurse, whose case was referred to in these columns, ranks, by her own confessions, With the professional poisoners of the middle ages. In one sense, she is worse than the political, profligates of the mediaeval type, because they used poison against their enemies, while she used it against friends.

In all the stories of the use of secret poisons since the time of the Borgias, there is nothing more shocking to trusting humanity than the story told by Jane Toppan of her own misdeeds. In the course of ten years she poisoned thirtyone persons, most of them patients entrusted to her care by physicians or friends. Yet her severest punishment is to be imprisonment in an insane asylum. In England, in 1531, when the Bishop of Rochester's cook POISONED SEVENTEEN PERSONS, and two of them died, Parlaiment passed an act declaring the-use of secret poisons to be high treason, and decreeing that those found guilty should be boiled to death. When, 341 years later, Mary Ann Cotton poisoned sixteen persons, all of whom died, all England was in a fury of amazement and Indignation. Of the professional poisoners of Italy, Hieronyma Spara and Toffania hold highest rank as criminals. Spara supplied the women of Rome with a tasteless and limpid poison with wtiich they KILLED THEIR HUSBANDS and other men hateful to them. Her victims werel numbered by the hundred, and when at last her crimes were exposed, she and thirteen of her companions were hanged, and scores of confederates whipped, half naked, through the streets of Rome.

For half a century, after that, however, secret poisoning in Italy was in vogue, and it was only when Toffania was arrested, tried, and strangled in 1719 that the mania died away. This woman, 70 years of age, was said to have caused the death of more than COO persons.

In France the MANIA FOR SECRET POISONS reached its most violent stage about 1670. Two women named Lavoisin and Lavigoreux combined- the trade of the poisoner with the ostensible occupation of the midwife, and numbered their victims by the hundred. They were discovered, tried, and condemned. In February, 16S0, they were burned alive, and from thirty to fifty of their accomplices were hanged in various cities of France.

Finding that secret poisoning was still practised, the French Government set out vigorously to stop it, and within the next two years more than a hundred persons, found guilty of using secret poisons, were burned at the stake or hanged on the gallows. Since that day there has been, in modern times, no record of the criminal use of poison so atrocious as that of Jane Toppan.