Earlier this year, RCSI Heritage Collections was delighted to receive the very generous donation of the archive belonging to the well-known chemists, Hayes, Conyngham & Robinson. We have only recently begun to explore the collection, but we can already tell it is a treasure trove, an unparalleled insight into a profession undergoing a century of relentless change. Given that Halloween occurred last week, Project Archivist, Erin McRae – who will be cataloguing this collection – has looked into HCR’s bottles, ledgers and recipe books to bring us this blogpost on one potentially ghoulish aspect of the pharmacists’ trade: the use of poisons. An apothecary in his laboratory concocting a mixture. Wood engraving by F.Mc F(?), 1876, after H.S. Marks. Wellcome Collection Poisons and their Uses: From High Fashion to Medicine In the popular imagination, poisons, and their potential to cause death has long been a source of morbid fascination. Poison is defined as “a substance that is capab