Tofana.
About the same time the woman Tofana was selling her Aquetta di Napoli in Italy, but she was not brought to justice until 1709, when she confessed to the Pope and the Emperor Charles VI that her drops contained arsenic, and that by them she had caused the deaths of more than six hundred persons. The Emperor repeated her story to his physician, Garelli, by whom it was communicated to Hoffmann, who published it in his “Rational Medicine.” She preferred to prepare her drops by rubbing arsenic into the broken joints of a hog just killed and then collecting the juice. Tofana took refuge in a convent and lived for some twenty years after her condemnation. A letter from the English Secretary of State to the Commissioners of Customs, dated July 29, 1717, is on record, cautioning them against admitting a liqueur called Aqua Tufania from Italy, as accounts of its dangerous character had been received from the British envoys at Naples and Genoa.