“On the Proper Administration of Mortal Remedies, or, the Feminine Science of Knowing Best”
By Professor Octavia Mallard (Originally printed in The Austral Raconteur, Sydney 1937)
It has lately amused me, in a dismal fashion, to observe the endurance of an old superstition: that women, uniquely, know their way about a bottle marked Poison. The shorthand of the centuries has made of us a class of domestic Medeas—suburban witches who stir both tea and tincture with the same spoon. To this day, one may hear a solicitor or a clergyman—often the same man in tone if not degree—remark after some tragic news that “only a woman would think of such means.” That a man, in his abundant ingenuity, might think of dynamite, pistol, or profit, but never of belladonna.
As an etymologist, I am suspicious of categories that have survived too long without redefinition; they are usually misleading fossils. The word “poison,” for instance, once merely meant a potion. The moral freight was added later—after, one imagines, some disappointed emperor found his cup unfriendly. But it is a particularly modern male flourish that insists women are the natural alchemists of deceit.
The Sydney newspapers have lately fed upon the case of Mrs. Keppel of Merrylands, whose unfortunate husband expired after a tonic administered nightly. “A woman’s weapon,” wrote The Daily Jacket, in a tone of brisk male horror. Yet I recall half a dozen male physicians standing trial these past years for similar improprieties in the chemist’s aisle; their crimes were reported in terms of error or confusion, never craft. It appears that when a man poisons, it is the bottle’s fault; when a woman does, it is a parable.
The Etymology of Fear
A certain Dr. Fenning (his lectures are passable; his opinions less so) recently published an opinion in Science and Society asserting that, “across ancient narratives, womanly intelligence tends toward the pharmacological.” He cited Eve, Circe, and a number of literary formulæ which will not withstand etymological inspection. The very term “witch,” he remarked, shares a root with “wit.” Quite so; and one might say the same of “witness,” a role women are seldom permitted when history convenes.
The confusion of knowing with mixing is old indeed. In Greek pharmakon meant both medicine and poison. The priestesses of Delphi were rumoured to breathe the same vapours that healed. Knowledge itself was suspect, and so conveniently classified as sorcery. That men later learned to package this knowledge into companies limited by liability should not, I think, absolve them of the same instinct. It is simply commerce in another dress.
On Gendered Recipes
An acquaintance of mine, a woman of unblemished respectability and some experience of husbands, insists that women are more discreet in their crimes because they are given no public practice in innocence. “Men murder on impulse,” she says, “because they still expect forgiveness.” There may be something in it. But I question whether poison is especially feminine, or simply convenient: it suits both those excluded from physical force and those vain about clean shirtsleeves.
Indeed, the annals of British crime list more male than female poisoners. The difference lies in the chroniclers. Mr. Hargreaves’s Tincture of Evil (London, 1882) opens with the declarative nonsense that “no woman poisons without sentiment.” Yet his appendices—nearly a hundred pages—catalogue military officers, lords, and mesmerists who did precisely that, sentiment be damned. Our mythology is less about chemistry than about classification; it decides who may err scientifically, and who must err emotionally.
An Improper Observation
I suppose the horror of the “female poisoner” represents an anxiety about the domestic interior. Men who feel safe within walls they do not dust are always startled to learn that safety is a cooperative illusion. The kitchen, the pharmacy, the nursery—all the rooms devoted to care—have their shadow side. But so does Parliament, and so does the Bank of New South Wales. No one calls the financiers witches, though their alchemy exceeds ours in both scale and gall.
Perhaps the phrase “women know best” began in frightened admiration. We did, after all, invent the reliable breakfast, the antiseptic cloth, and the social courtesy that keeps the talk flowing while the soup cools. That such knowing should be transposed, by men, into the idiom of guilt says less about women’s perfidy than about men’s imagination. To a certain kind of mind, knowledge without ownership—particularly feminine knowledge—is intolerable. Better to call it witchcraft than to concede its authority.
The Sydney Scandal of Knowledge
Not long ago, in these very quarters, the philosopher Mrs. Enid Corsham gave a lecture titled The Household as Laboratory, wherein she proposed that every act of daily maintenance is an experiment in local chemistry. The response of her audience—a collection of academics and one startled bishop—was polite disbelief. Yet her point was simple: the line between “domestic science” and “poison” is a matter of dosage. “To know,” she said, “is merely to measure correctly.” Her pamphlet now circulates quietly among my students, the male ones trembling slightly when they accept it.
If there is a moral here, it is precisely that the means of harm and the means of health are rarely separable. What disquiets the moralist is that the same intelligence governs both. A woman who can dose a child’s cough may also calculate a husband’s peace—and that, I suspect, is what the newspapers truly fear.
Closing Reflections
As a scholar of words, I find in “poison” a peculiar symmetry: its sound suggests both pause and incision, its letters balanced like scales. In language, as in life, we worry at the point where remedy becomes motive. Perhaps the truth is that everyone knows best—men and women alike—and that the contest lies not in knowledge but in narrative. Men have written of witches, women of physicians; both employ the same Latin.
One might conclude, then, that the myth survives because it flatters two illusions at once: that women’s wisdom is perilous, and men’s ignorance pure. But grammar does not recognise innocence—and neither, in the end, does science. The compound is the same; only the label differs.
(Editor’s note: Professor Mallard’s article stirred “spirited correspondence,” including a brief from a gentleman in Paddington declaring that the author’s “tone itself was toxic.” The letter, inexplicably, arrived scented faintly of camphor.)
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