It’s early February, and time to spend ridiculous amounts of money on pieces of colored card stock, reminding my nearest and dearest of how much I love them.  Many people look forward to Valentine’s Day as the highlight of a month dedicated to love and romance, as well as large profits for card makers, florists and chocolate sellers.  But what if those gestures of romance go unrequited?  In times past, people would seek out the local healer, gladly parting with hard earned cash to obtain a love potion that they would slip it into a drink the object of their desire was consuming.  Indeed, over the years people have invested in many things reputed to be aphrodisiacs, including oysters and chocolate.  Arthur Ford decided that chocolates would be his road to romance, but maybe they needed a little something extra to really seal the deal.

In 1954, Arthur Ford worked as an office manager for a large chemical manufacturer in London.  Although Arthur was already a husband and father, he had reached those dangerous middle age years that some men experience, where the desire to rekindle the passions of his youth caused his eye to fall upon Miss Betty Grant, one of the young women who worked in Arthur’ office.  Arthur was smitten, and proclaimed his undying love for Betty, though Miss Grant was less enamored with the concept and kept putting him off.  It was now that Arthur decided a little pharmaceutical encouragement was warranted.

Frustratingly, although Arthur worked in a chemical factory, the company did not have any “Love Potion Number 9” on its shelves.  However, what they did sell was a chemical called cantharidin.  Cantharidin is the main component of Spanish Fly, and although Arthur was aware of Spanish Fly’s (unmerited) reputation as an aphrodisiac, he wasn’t aware his company sold the chemical until an order for it crossed his desk.  Spanish Fly is made from the crushed bodies of insects, which in this case are not even flies, and don’t come from Spain, but rather from beetles of the Meloidae family that live worldwide.

Cantharidin is a blistering agent, and can cause severe chemical burns on exposed skin or soft tissue.  Although cantharidin has medicinal uses in the treatment of warts, it is listed as a “problem drug” , and must be used under close physician supervision.  Because of its chemical structure, cantharidin gets easily absorbed by the cells of the skin, but in doing so releases several enzymes that break the connections between skin cells allowing blistering and skin erosion typical of a chemical burn.  When ingested, that same ability to erode and burn skin tissues causes blistering first in the mouth, then as is moves into the stomach and intestine strips the lining of those organs, leading to bloody vomiting.  As the digestive tract is weakened, allowing cantharidin to enter the blood stream, the kidneys try to eliminate the toxin in the urine, but the kidneys too blister and burn resulting in bloody urine. There is no antidote. Death is fast and painful.

Arthur Ford was unaware of these problems when he stole 2.5g of cantharidin (enough to kill 200 people) from the company stocks.  The next day Ford bought some pink and white coconut ice chocolates, and using the blades of a pair of scissors carefully impregnated select chocolates with his supposed aphrodisiac.   At around 2:30 on the afternoon of April 26th 1954, Arthur took his chocolates into the office.  Rather then letting the office staff chose their own chocolates, Arthur gave hand-picked confectionary to his select female office workers.  Within 15 minutes Betty Grant complained of severe stomach cramps and nausea, and went to the company sick room.  Deciding she would feel better at home, Betty took a taxi to her house, but repeatedly vomited in the taxi before arriving home.  Clearly something was very wrong.  By the time her primary care physician had seen her and arranged for her to be admitted to hospital, she was vomiting almost pure blood.  Betty’s friend Miss Malins, who had also eaten the aphrodisiac chocolate, fared no better, and before the night was out, both women were dead.  Such rapid and unusual deaths meant a post-mortem examination, which revealed the presence of cantharidin in the women’s bodies at levels ten times the lethal dose. It was now clear that nothing could have been done to save the two women.

Arthur Ford was arrested and sent to trial over the deaths of Miss Malins and Miss Grant.  Ford was devastated.  He had set out to give them something that would make the women fall in love with him, and had never intended to do them any harm.  In the absence of premeditation, Arthur stood trial for manslaughter, to which he pled guilty.  He was sentenced to five years in prison.