Thanks to Warren Ellis, I got to read this very creepy BBC News article.
A two-hour drive south-east of Budapest, the village of Nagyrev is like countless others dotted across the Danubian plain. Modest single-storey homes line its few muddy streets. But beneath its pastoral exterior, Nagyrev nurses a dark secret. Nearly a century ago, with World War I raging, the womenfolk here began to poison their husbands.[snip]
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.
[snip]
Over the years, with the village cemetery filling up, police suspicions grew. They started to exhume bodies. Out of 50 bodies examined, 46 contained arsenic. Fingers pointed towards the midwife.
[snip]
Perhaps they were not the only ones. In the nearby town of Tiszakurt, other exhumed bodies were found to contain arsenic, but no-one was convicted of their deaths. The total death toll in the area may, according to some estimates, have been as high as 300. [Ed. note: emphasis mine.]
Well, well. Interesting. I guess things sucked for women then eh? Hard to see why they'd try to wipe out the males otherwise.
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