The historical origins of hormesis are quite fascinating. Mithradates VI (135–63 BC), the king of Pontus, a kingdom located in the modern-day eastern Black Sea region of Turkey, had suspected since he was a child that his mother would poison him to death. In an attempt to protect himself from his murderous mother, he would regularly ingest small doses of venom, believing this would defend him against all poisons. Since then, the system of administering nonlethal small doses of venom in an attempt to avert future poisoning has been termed Mithradatism.5 The sixteenth-century Swiss physician
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