I will kiss thy lips;/haply some poison yet doth hang on them.
A friar gave Juliet a potion which would, he said, stop her breathing for 42 hours, her body would go cold and she would stiffen to look dead. Tetrodotoxin, a poison from puffer fish, can induce a deathlike state and has been known about for centuries in Japan. Dr Harkup says that although such a poison was not available in Elizabethan England when Shakespeare was alive, or 14thcentury Verona, home of Romeo and Juliet, he may have heard about such a toxin from vendors travelling the world.