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Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2000 18:02:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Alfred M Kriman <akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu>
Message-Id: <200003082302.SAA21675@darwin.helios.nd.edu>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: carbingestion

Phillip S. Peek:
> Brutus' wife Porcia is said to have commited suicide by swallowing hot
> coals (Plutarch, Brutus, 53). Anyone know of other examples of someone who
> is said to have commited suicide in the same way?

IIRC, the chemist Bunsen committed suicide by taking a lemon-juice chaser
after drinking an aqueous solution of potassium cyanide.  In the reaction
that ensued (KCN + HR --> HCN(g) + KR, where R is citrate, I guess), it
was of course the cyanide gas release that was fatal, but I believe the
reaction is exothermic, so there is a similarity.  Generally speaking,
the precise mechanism of death may not be what the suicide imagines.  For
example, in the case of starvation (a kind of reverse metonym for
inanition) one usually dies by succumbing to diseases that one's crippled
immune system can no longer fight. 

.