Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

3. Matters Medical

Cases of Poisoning (I)

I am sending you an account of Mithridates from “experts”, but it does not illuminate for me your reference.

The information of the experts is defective. Mithridates in order to guard himself against all possibility of poisoning immunised himself by training his system to take all poisons first by small then by increasing doses. He did it so well that when the Romans were after him in their genial manner and he had no choice but death at their hands or his own, he could not take recourse to poison and had to end himself by a  vulgar perforation with steel – at least I think it was steel. He was not a Persian king, though he was of Indo-Persian extraction as his name shows. I believe he was king of Armenia or Bithynia or some such obsolete place in Asia Minor.

27.02.1935