The poisoner's handbook
The untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. A pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner serving poisoned pies, and many others. Each case presents a deadly new puzzle and Norris and Gettler create revolutionary experiments to tease out even the wiliest compounds from human tissue. From the vantage of their laboratory it also becomes clear that murderers aren't the only toxic threat--modern life has created a kind of poison playground, and danger lurks around every corner.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
4people
2012–2020years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A Spy Among Friends by Ben McIntyre--eye-opening account of Britain's most famous double-agent Kim Philby--and why we should be very concerned about Russian meddling in U.S. politics The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone--about David Fairchild, the man who changed what we eat in the U.S. over 100 years ago Regeneration by Pat Barker, a novel based on real facts about WWI The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum--the origin of modern forensic medicine
- any history book by Ben MacIntyre is a terrific read. He has written sseveral about WWII: I've read Agent Zig-Zag and Operation Mincemeat. He also wrote a good book about the spy Kim Phiulby, A Spy Among Friends. Another great book about WWII is Citizens of London by Lynne Olson. One of the best books I've read recently is Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads that fills in the gaps of history for Westerners. Jaw-dropping details on almost every page--such as the real meaning of the Italian greeting ciao ("I am your slave") because Italian ports were the ceneter of the Roaman slave trade--they had to import 450,000-500,000 per year to keep the empire humming...and the origin of the word slave from the Slavs who were captured by the red-haired Vikings as they moved south...knowns as the Russes, who became known as the Russians..
some others-- The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone anything by Erik Larson but especially Isaac's Storm (about the Galveston hurricane of 1900) and In the Garden of Beasts (about the American ambassort to 1930s Nazi Germany) Travels with Herodotus and Shah of Shas by Ryszard Kapuscinski The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum Parisians by Graham Robb
- Midgely absolutely knew of the risks of lead, or at least he should have -- he had to take a leave of absence from his work to recover from a case of lead poisoning, and so many workers in the plant that made tetraethyl lead (TEL) developed inexplicable odd behaviors from their own cases that locals referred to the plant as "the loony gas building."
Worse still, Midgely worked actively to cover the risks of lead up. He even held a press conference in 1924 where, to assure reporters that TEL was safe, he washed his hands in a bowl of the stuff (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40593353)!
Deborah Blum covered the whole story in her excellent 2011 book, The Poisoner's Handbook (https://www.amazon.com/Poisoners-Handbook-Murder-Forensic-Me...). Blum excerpted the story of TEL for a piece in Wired, which can be read here: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/looney-gas-and-lead-poisoning-...
- If you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Deborah Blum’s excellent 2011 book The Poisoner’s Handbook (https://www.amazon.com/Poisoners-Handbook-Murder-Forensic-Me...), which tells the stories of a bunch of different chemical catastrophes from the same period. Radium is covered, as well as such other “what were they thinking?” stories as the introduction of lead into gasoline and the poisoning of industrial alcohol by the government during Prohibition in a misguided effort to keep it from being turned into bootleg liquor. It’s full of fascinating case studies, and Blum has an engaging writing style that makes it a good read.
If you prefer to watch your history, PBS’ American Experience documentary series did an episode based on Blum’s book (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poisoners ); it can be streamed via a bunch of different video services.
- Yes, there was skepticism, but there wasn't much, legally, that skeptics could do to prevent these products from being sold. If you're interested in this stuff, you should check out a book called "The Poisoner's Handbook", written by a journalist named Deborah Blum. It covers the development of forensic toxicology, which eventually lead to a lot of consumer protection laws. There's even a chapter on radium, Radithor, and the women who worked with radium in the watch dial factory.
- My source was The Poisoner's Handbook, which suggests that deaths were not tracked well or at all in most of the US. The book gives statistics for New York City but a cursory examination of its sources does not seem to list where those statistics were obtained from. The best source for statistics likely doesn't exist, but likely bets would include hospital records and any statistics published by whatever coroner/medical examiner's offices you can find.
One source [0] seems to suggest that deaths were lower but rising. Deaths from poisoned alcohol tripled between 1920 and 1925.[1] The author of the latter paper (Mark Thorton) has written extensively on the subject, his book The Economics of Prohibition may be informative.
[0] http://druglibrary.org/prohibitionresults1.htm [1] https://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html
