The Newt in Her Mouth

Eleanor Ormerod, youngest of ten children on a Gloucestershire estate, taught herself entomology from a beetle manual she picked up on 12 March 1852. She would become the Royal Agricultural Society's consulting entomologist and the first woman ever awarded an honorary LL.D. by the University of Edinburgh.

She worked from home.

She and her sister Georgiana ran Torrington House in St Albans as a live-insect laboratory: thousands of warble maggots, Hessian flies, turnip-flies, and beetles in bottles and boxes throughout the house. She kept live specimens in her pockets and produced them, unannounced, at meetings with farmers who had merely come to ask about their crops.

Long before any of that, in 1873, she had written her first scientific paper on the poisonous secretions of the crested newt. She dosed a cat first. Then she picked up a live newt and put its tail in her own mouth.

She wrote down what happened. A bitter astringent feeling. Foaming. Oral convulsions. Throat irritation. A subsequent headache.

Nine years later the Royal Agricultural Society hired her. She joked her gravestone should read: She brought Paris Green to Britain.

It was arsenic.