Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/252

 the case, it is altogether likely that a woman who is an arsenic-eater exhales from her person a sufficient amount of the poison to render her most undesirable for a wife, unless she occupies a separate apartment. Otherwise, she may share the fate of the damsel Sara, mentioned in the Apocrypha, the heroine of the book of Tobit, who had had seven husbands, all of whom were destroyed on the marriage night by an evil spirit. For the emanations from her body will certainly carry with them minute particles of the poisonous metal. The only reason that this is not the fate of the Styrian and Tyrolese damsels is, that with them lover and lady are both accustomed to use the drug. Like Mithridates, they have by long habit rendered themselves poison-proof.

It is somewhat singular that the drugs which at present are most in renown as cosmetics for the skin, are precisely the most deadly poisons known in the whole catalogue of chemical products. They are arsenic, prussic acid, corrosive sublimate, and caustic potash. As there are always dealers unscrupulous enough to sacrifice their own consciences (if they keep the article) and their customers' lives by selling, under sounding names, these perilous stuffs, we urgently warn all persons to be exceedingly cautious in making such purchases.