Here’s a fascinating article I discovered in The Stamp Collector’s Magazine (UK) published October 1, 1872. Poisoned Postage Stamps? Who could resist it? It reads as follows:

The following story curious narrative caught our eye in a French paper of recent date, and was doubtless originally translated from some American journal. We translate it back into English, and give it for what it may be worth.

Doctor Chesley, of Nottingham, New Hampshire, received, a few days since, a letter, bearing a signature with which he was acquainted, and enclosing two postage stamps, accompanied with a request for a prompt reply to an address in New York. The doctor, thinking he had unearthed a client, wrote off instanter the required reply, and stuck on the envelope one of the stamps he had received. But no sooner had he pressed his tongue across the gummed back of the stamp than he felt a sudden qualm. He immediately tried his pulse, looked at his tongue in the glass, listened to his own breathing, and set down in writing the following diagnostic: “Mysterious sensation of lassitude; convulsive beating of the heart; difficulty in breathing; general disturbance of the system.” Having thus “diagnosticated,” the doctor called for his wife, and said to her, “my dear I have poisoned myself with this postage stamp.”

“Intentionally?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “Involuntarily. It was sent em through the post, and I did not know it was poisoned.”

“My dear, it’s not possible,” returned the wife.

“Not possible,” he cried. “That’s just like women, well then madame, do me the favour to lick the other postage stamp.” And he handed her the other postage stamp sent. She wetted it with her tongue, and was immediately seized with the same symptoms as those of her husband, but of a much more violent character.

“There, I told you so,” cried the doctor, triumphantly. Then he felt his wife’s pulse, made her show her tongue, applied his ear to her chest, and said rubbing his hands, “You are much more severely bitten than I. Would you like to know how that happens?”

“I would much rather you saved me, murmured the wife.

“Let us go in an orderly way to work,” replied the doctor. You must first learn why the symptoms are more accentuated with you than with me; secondly, I shall save myself, for, having absorbed the poison first, it is but logical that I should get rid of it first. After that I will take you in hand.”

Here the doctor made a pause, introduced his finger and thumb into a tobacco pouch, thence withdrew a pinch of tobacco, and holding it under his wife’s nose, “You have often reproached me madame,” said he, “with smoking tobacco, but it is this vulgar habit which you may thank me for not being a widow now, for the tobacco has acted as an antidote, vulgarly called a counter-poison, and that is why you are worse than I am.”

If the doctor had continued a few minutes longer, his wife would have been lost; he stopped in time, took an emetic himself, and administered to her another emetic, and both husband and wife are quite well today. The suspected stamps have been sent to Boston to be analysed.

What a strange and curious story. Do any of our readers have similar stories?