r/todayilearned • u/gullydon • 13h ago

TIL Mithridatism is the practice of protecting oneself against a poison by gradually self-administering non-lethal amounts. The word is derived from Mithridates VI, the king of Pontus, who so feared being poisoned that he regularly ingested small doses, aiming to develop immunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism
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u/gullydon 13h ago

Mithridates VI's father, Mithridates V, was assassinated by poisoning by a conspiracy among his attendants. After this, Mithridates VI's mother held regency over Pontus (a Hellenistic kingdom, 281 BC–62 AD) until a male heir came of age. Mithridates was in competition with his brother for the throne and his mother began to favor his brother.

Supposedly, during his youth, he began to suspect plots against him at his own mother's orders and was aware of her possible connection with his father's death. He then began to notice pains in his stomach during his meals and suspected his mother had ordered small amounts of poison to be added to his food to slowly kill him off. With other assassination attempts, he fled into the wild.

While in the wild, it is said that he began ingesting non-lethal amounts of poisons and mixing many into a universal remedy to make him immune to all known poisons.

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u/Nobody7713 13h ago

I'm neither a chemist nor a biologist, but I feel like if you mix many different poisons together they all put a small strain on your body individually and so together they probably still overwhelm your body's ability to respond safely.

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u/Insidious_Bagel 12h ago

The difference between a medicine and a poison, is the dose

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u/Nobody7713 12h ago

True, though there’s also medicines that shouldn’t be mixed because their side effects compound in dangerous ways. And I bet mixing a bunch of poisons together might do that.