By Jim Fish
BBC World Affairs correspondent, Nagyrev, Hungary
Nearly a century ago, with World War I raging, the womenfolk here began to poison their husbands.
Now aged 83, Maria Gunya was a little girl when her father, a local official, was asked by the police to help investigate a series of unexplained deaths in the village.
It turned out that the woman behind many of the deaths was the village midwife, Zsuzsanna Fazekas. At that time, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was no resident doctor or health service.
The midwife enjoyed a monopoly of basic medical training.
“The women used to come to Mrs Fazekas with their problems,” Mrs Gunya recalls.
She said that when they complained about their drunken or violent husbands, Mrs Fazekas told them: “If there’s a problem with him, I have a simple solution”.
That solution was arsenic, distilled by the midwife by soaking flypaper in water.
Over the years, with the village cemetery filling up, police suspicions grew. They started to exhume bodies.
via dph
