The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in… (edition 2011)

A really interesting book for anyone who likes to read about the history of medicine or true crime (or, ideally, both). Deborah Blum has a very readable writing style and the book was the perfect mix of history, science facts, and true crime stories. ( )

The central story of the Poisoner's Handbook is a war between poisoners and chemists working to detoxify poisoned beverages. The surprising thing is that the poisoners work for the US government and the detoxifiers for criminals. The setting is the years between 1920, when the 18th amendment started prohibition, and 1933, when the 21st repealed it. During Prohibition, the government used a variety of compounds to "denature" ethanol. A lot of nasty stuff was tried, including gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, mercury salts, ether, chloroform, carbolic acid, and acetone, but the one that killed or blinded the most illegal drinkers was methanol, which is metabolized to formaldehyde and formic acid. The optic nerve is particularly susceptible to attack by formic acid, which is why victims who did not die often became blind. The death toll from denatured industrial methanol during Prohibition is estimated to be more than 10,000. Not every government official was happy with the policy, and the heroes of the book are Dr. Charles Norris, chief of laboratories at New York's Bellevue Hospital and toxicologist Alexander Gettner, who not only campaigned against the denature of industrial alcohol, but also laid the groundwork for forensic chemistry in the US. While the Prohibition story is the centerpiece of "The Poisoner's Handbook", there are chapters describing many of the other favorite chemical compounds of the poisoner, and their detection by forensic chemists. Blum is not a chemist, and there are places where she could have used a chemistry-literate editor, but the writing is otherwise good and the story is compelling. ( )

I read about this book in an article called "23 Science Books That Are So Exciting They Read Like Genre Fiction", and it did not disappoint. It is similar to Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, which I loved, in that it is a sort of history of science/medicine, but instead of focusing on one specific case (e.g. the cholera outbreak in London), The Poisoner's Handbook covers about two decades, from 1915-1936. Each chapter focuses on a specific poison (e.g. arsenic or cyanide) and time period; the chapter headings include the chemical makeup of the poison in question.

The two main figures that the author follows are Charles Norris, chief medical examiner of New York from 1918, and Alexander Gettler, a toxicologist in his lab at Bellevue Hospital. Norris and Gettler solved many cases that baffled the police, and helped establish the validity and usefulness of forensic medicine (medical jurisprudence). The two did groundbreaking work, inventing new techniques and publishing many papers on the topic, all while underfunded.

However, the most lethal and widespread of the poisons they encountered were the various forms of alcohol that people consumed during Prohibition, including wood alcohol (denatured grain alcohol, or industrial alcohol). Gettler foresaw the problems Prohibition would cause, and was unfortunately proven right.

Part detective mystery, part medical and scientific history, The Poisoner's Handbook is an engaging read (though not for the squeamish), comparable to The Ghost Map and Typhoid Mary.

Quotes:

So began a deadly cat and mouse game - scientists and poisoners as intellectual adversaries. (2)

As soon as legal drinking ended, purveyors of illicit alcohol came helpfully forward...[A Brooklyn judge said], "Prohibition is a joke. It has deprived the poor workingman of his beer and it has flooded the country with rat poison." (50-51)

Only two years into the great Prohibition experiment, the State of New York was ready to give it up. Where were the high moral standards, the uplifted culture, and the return to prewar innocence promised by supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment? So far the effects seemed almost the opposite, considering the street shootings, the increasingly brazen speakeasy trade, and the mounting deaths from poisoned alcohol. (88-89)

[From the chapter on carbon monoxide, (CO)] In New York City a personal automobile offered escape from standing on a snow-slushed sidewalk waiting for a surface car (streetcar), and from risking one's life in the rackety elevated trains. Reliable public transportation had yet to be realized... (129)

[From the chapter on methyl alcohol (CH3OH), on the government's adding extra poisons to industrial alcohol, and dry legislators' defense that "no one would be dead if people simply obeyed the law and tried to live in a morally upright fashion"] Norris, in response, argued that this imposition of one group's personal beliefs on the rest of society could not be justified as moral. (163)

[From the chapter on ethyl alcohol (C2H5OH)] The Prohibition era had been a great source of material for building an excellent science of alcohol intoxication. (211)

[From the chapter on thallium (TI)] In a best-selling book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs...a pair of consumer-advocate authors complained that American citizens had become test animals for chemical industries that were indifferent to their customers' well-being. The government...was complicit. Regulation was almost nonexistent. The nineteen-year-old FDA was a joke, lacking authority to set even minimal safety standards. (245)

[After a cough syrup, Elixir Sulfanilamide, killed over 100 people, mostly children] The following year Congress passed and Roosevelt signed the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which empowered the FDA to demand safety testing and accurate labeling and to hold manufacturers legally responsible for harming their customers. (262)

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This is a fun read and all. It's a history of the Prohibition and the development of forensic science, with lots of lurid crime thrown in and a smattering of chemistry.

The problem is that it's called a poisoner's handbook, so I was hoping for, y'know, some hands-on instructions. Like: here's where you get some poison, and there's what you should do with it, right? I mean, every one of the poisons in this book, we end by learning that it's not a good choice to kill a dude with because it's too easy to detect, or not sure enough, or I drank it already. So that's not that helpful, and I think books should be helpful.

It was fun, really. If you think the description sounds interesting, you'll like it. I just doubt I'll remember much of it in a month. ( )

I'm torn in reviewing this one. It's dry, and while the chapter headings are a good idea, the author doesn't follow through. The book can't decide if it wants to be a book about the medical examiners or the compounds they study. It is only tangentially about the jazz age, as the blurb suggests. I wouldn't have finished reading it, but the chemicals are mentioned in so many of the early mystery novels I read that it was interesting as a sort of research. ( )