Mushroom Poisoning - Famous Poisonings

Famous Poisonings

• Siddhartha Gautama (known as The Buddha), by some accounts, may have died of mushroom poisoning around ~479 BCE, though this claim has not been universally accepted.
• Roman Emperor Claudius is said to have been murdered by being fed the death cap mushroom. However this story first appeared some two centuries after the events, and it is even debatable whether Claudius was murdered at all. Pope Clement VII is also rumored to have been murdered this way. However it is similarly debated whether he died from any kind of poisoning at all.
• Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI and Tsaritsa Natalia Naryshkina are believed to have died from eating the death cap mushroom.
• According to a popular legend, the composer Johann Schobert died in Paris, along with his wife, one of his children, maidservant and four acquaintances after insisting that certain poisonous mushrooms were edible.
• The best-selling author Nicholas Evans (The Horse Whisperer) was poisoned after eating Cortinarius speciosissimus.
• The parents of the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, who created the Fahrenheit temperature scale, died in Danzig on 14 August 1701 from accidentally eating poisonous mushrooms.