When I was thinking about the saying, 'the dose makes the poison,' I ended up remembering a show I didn't pay close attention to, but I was around for the Twilight Zone Twist at the end. I was pretty sure it was a more mundane episode of The Twilight Zone, but I couldn't find it on a list of episode summaries.A married couple are taking care of an elderly mother (I think it might have been the wife's mother, but I'm not sure), but for money-related reasons like life insurance or expensive medical bills, they decide to kill her, and settle on poisoning her tea for the method. It takes far longer than they expected for her to die, so they increase the dose. After she does finally die, the family doctor makes a comment about her heart condition, and how she needed treatment by a certain drug, commenting on its reputation as a deadly poison, yet for someone with her condition, it's life-saving medicine at the right dose. Naturally, the drug in question was what they were giving her, unintentionally medicating her and extending her life instead of shortening it.
7 comments:
If it keeps nagging at you, you might want to try You Know That Show over at TV Tropes. Perhaps someone there will remember it.
I don't think the Twilight Zone ever got that mundane.
I don't think I've seen the show in question, but the mention of the heart condition makes me think of Digitalis purpurea. Nasty stuff... unless you have congestive heart failure.
Throughout your first paragraph, I was sure you were going to refer to an example of mithraditization, or, as Dashiell Hammett would say, the "Maybrick-Seddons trick", wherein the would-be murderer eats the same food as his/her victim, and so must secretly build up a tolerance by taking ever-increasing doses him/herself.
Ooh! ooh! Suppose the murderous couple had tried to do exactly that, with (thanks, Rhoadan) digitalis, and wound up poisoning themselves, but saving Mom? That would be really cool, and ironic, and all that, but it wouldn't be the show you saw. I'm no help; sorry.
My guess is you might be remembering an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents".
Oh, yeah. That's probably right. My brother and I went through a phase of watching that on Nick at Nite.
I think its an Agatha Christie story, one of her short stories, maybe Miss Marple.
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