The Poisoner’s Handbook: Ch 9-10

If the wood alcohol and the methyl alcohol chapters weren’t enough to convince you to be careful while drinking, then the ethyl alcohol chapter will put you over the edge. This chapter brings out even more cases in which people drank themselves to death. Blum lays out such a variety of examples in order to get the reader to understand how widespread and common death from poisons became. Left and right people were either being poisoned or poisoning themselves. What makes these examples scarier is that some of them came right from the records of Alexander Gettler. These murders and deaths are not just made up fictions, they are actual events that occurred in the early 1900s.

The ethyl alcohol chapter is interesting because it has the usual murder stories that Blum puts in, and also talks about the science behind Gettler figuring out how the alcohol affects the brain. While the obvious purpose of this book may be to make people aware of poisons, I believe that Blum had another intention, to show the development of science and how fast the information grew about poisons during the time period of World War I. Blum does a nice job of weaving in the science part of poisons while adding in the murder mystery part as well.

Chapter ten is a continuation from before discussing carbon monoxide. It makes sense that Blum comes back to this poison because it is still relevant today. What stood out to me in this chapter was the amount of cases that Gettler and Norris studied before getting to their conclusions. The scientists studied sixty-five cases to figure out the effects of carbon monoxide. While that may not seem like too many, each of these cases is linked to a unique story that affected many people: it is interesting to think about how many people have to be affected by something before it is brought to the table for analysis. There are probably poisons right now that don’t have a cure because they are not common enough for a scientist to focus on. Again, this chapter includes a variety of different stories, such as someone leaving a car running in a garage to intentional carbon monoxide deaths. The end of this chapter talks about two criminals going to the electric chair. The electric chair was popular at this time and I read lots about it in Murder of the Century as well. There was a prison called Sing Sing for people who were waiting to be put in the chair. The name does not seem too fitting for the place if you ask me.

I did not choose a quote from these two chapters, but what interested me was how Blum would list out four cases in a row each with small summaries on how someone died from the poisons. This format has not been used up to this point in the book, so it caught my attention and I ended up picking out similarities and differences between each of the deaths.

Here is Deborah Blum’s website because she actually has written many interesting science pieces and if you’re into that, you should look into her books.  http://deborahblum.com/

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Ch 7-8

“Their outrage crackled like a current in the air” (117).

Chapters seven and eight have to do with methyl alcohol and radium. Chapter seven ties back to earlier chapters and the struggle for people against Prohibition. This chapter not only talks about the dangers of the alcohols people consumed during the Prohibition, but also about the government and how they tried to handle the new amendment. The government started to poison alcohol to discourage people from drinking it, but do you think that worked? Now, more people were dying during the prohibition era than before, as all the alcohol they consumed was poisonous. And as more people kept on dying, the government decided to add more poison to the alcohols. This started a mini war between Prohibition supporters and opposers. But as this is going on, people are still dying.

One problem with trying to get rid of alcohol was that it was used in everyday products so there was no way to completely get rid of it. The book states that alcohol is present in over two hundred household and industrial products. People that opposed Prohibition wrote papers and made statements such as “The Eighteenth is the only amendment which carries the death penalty” (159). Even the famous pathologists, Gettler and Norris, got in arguments with the government about what to do about alcohols. The author seems to side with Norris and Gettler, who released studies showing the negative effects of the Prohibition Movement. It is not surprising that Blum supports the two pathologists as she speaks highly of them throughout the book.

The next part of the story is, surprise surprise, a murder mystery. This is another dark story of a wife killing her husband. And guess what happens after the mystery is solved? Gettler and Norris find out something new that leads to further trials. This woman is having an affair with a guy and decides to run away with him. But first, they need money and to get rid of the husband. So they get life insurance and then the next morning the daughter finds her dad dead and her mom seemingly injured. They medical examiners get to work and realize that the wife faked a robbery and she actually killed her own husband with chloroform. After the chloroform she hit him multiple times in the head and then tied wire around his neck. This led Gettler to wonder if he was dead after the chloroform or if it took everything else. After experimenting on dogs, he figured out the correct dosage of chloroform for hospitals to use before performing procedures on patients.

The quote that I took from these chapters shows the bigger importance of the handbook of poisons. These discoveries are used to end arguments and settle disputes, and that was one of Gettler and Norris’s main goals. They wanted their work to leave a legacy for further cases in order to better America. Blum portrays these two as heroes and I would agree with her. They even influenced the presidential election at the time, which is partly what the radium chapter covers. Overall, prepare for similar blog posts in the future, because not much is changing in this book.

The Poisoner’s Handbook Ch 3-4

“All of it reminded them only of mistakes that they intended not to make again” – 74, The Poisoner’s Handbook

Chapters three and four dealt with Cyanides and Arsenic respectively. The way the book works is that at the beginning of the chapter a crime is introduced where someone is killed by an unknown poison. Then Alexander Gettler is called, who goes through autopsies to discover new poisons. By the end of the chapter, the crime is solved, but usually there is not enough evidence to convict the person who committed the crime, so they are free. After this, Gettler performs more tests with the poison so next time the person can be properly convicted.

A few more connections to Murder of the Century popped up in this chapter. The book mentioned sending someone to Sing Sing, a correctional facility in New York that used to be used for death sentences. The Poisoner’s Handbook and Murder of the Century have a ton in common; they are both murder books that deal with tricky murderers that get sent to a trial where there usually isn’t enough evidence to convict them, so then the books take you back to the murders to find more clues. This brings up a question: Why is this type of novel at this time period so popular? This book also reminds me of Murder of the Century because there are some veery interesting parts and then some very boring parts.

The most exciting part of the Cyanide chapter is when it talked about all the lowkey speakeasy’s that popped up during the prohibition. There were a pair of cops that would bust the speakeasy’s in very creative ways. For example, they would pretend to be famous opera singers, sing for the bar, and then arrest them and close down the place. They took their job and had a ton of fun with it.

Poisons were so popular during this time period because there had not been enough research about them, so it wasn’t completely known how they worked. Also, they were found in everyday products, so they were easy to acquire. One problem in the Arsenic chapter was that there is a small amount of Arsenic in our body already, so it was hard for the attorney to prove that the arsenic found in the autopsy was from an outside source.

The quote at the top describes the circle of each chapter. A murderer uses a new poison and they figure everything out too late. In the Cyanide chapter, someone got away with putting cyanide in a restaurant’s blueberry pie, causing everyone that ordered it to get sick or die. Because it is a delayed effect, the murderer had time to leave the scene and not get caught. To me, the most interesting parts of each chapter are the motives that the murderers have as well as how they find out who to convict. Usually the motives deal with getting rid of annoying people. In one case, a girl kills her sisters and parents so she can have all the inheritance from her parents.

Hopefully no one is annoying so I won’t have to use any techniques I’ve learned from reading this book… Just remember, if you are eating something and it tastes funny, you probably should stop eating it. That advice would have saved many people from the white Arsenic powder from Chapter 4.

 

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Ch 1-2

“No one knew how to fix it because no one was sure why it happened.” – 10, The Poisoner’s Handbook

Each chapter in The Poisoner’s Handbook is about a type of poison and how it came to use. When all of these poisons are put together in a book, it’s a poisoner’s handbook, hence the title. So far, the book has covered Chloroform and Wood Alcohol. To keep the book interesting, the novel includes an interesting story about how each poison became popular and a case where it was used. The first two chapters are set back in the 1910s, when poisons first became popular. They were easy to use without leaving a huge trace, so they were involved in many murders. This book combines anecdotes with science to create an interesting blend of fiction and science.

The Chloroform chapter talks about how the poison was used to kill people in the hospital, to “speed up” their death. An Austrian coroner, Frederic Mors, self-reported himself to have killed many people in the hospital using poison. The chapter discusses the difficulty of getting sufficient evidence to prove him guilty, along with small anecdotes of how he found the correct dosage.

The Wood Alcohol chapter is dated slightly after the first chapter, and discusses life during the Prohibition & Temperance Movement. A smart pathologist, Alexander Gettler, predicted that when Prohibition was implemented, the number of deaths caused by wood alcohol would increase, due to its cheap cost. People would try to make their own types of alcohol and would poison themselves.

These two chapters reminded me of the last book I read for this class, Murder of the Century. The two books are both dated at the turn of the 20th century and take place in New York. They both involve crimes, so Tammany Hall is part of both books. Each book contains mystery murders and lead the reader through the journey to find out who committed the crimes. I am interested to read more of The Poisoner’s Handbook to see if there are more similarities between the two.

So far, this book is somewhat interesting, but I hope it picks up a little more. The most interesting parts so far have been the murders and how they were done so professionally in places like the hospital. I predict that as the book goes on, the poisons will begin to get more complex, which will lead to more complex murders. So far, the chemicals have been pretty basic, and the murders are basic as well, like putting a cloth of chloroform over a patient. But as the book progresses, it will become more complex.

Chloroform in the Civil War                                                                                                                    The book also discussed using poison during WWI, and how the Germans used it first and the United States held back, feeling that it was unfair. Then, realizing all the people being killed in combat, the U.S. decided to turn to poison as well. This link discusses poison in the Civil War.

Wood Alcohol during Prohibition                                                                                                          The book refers to WWI as the chemist’s war, as does this article. This article also discusses how Prohibition led to an increase in deaths by wood alcohol, and it is interesting because it blames this on the government. I believe that the author would agree with the statement that the government caused the rise of wood alcohol in the early 1900s by making alcohol illegal. This would cause people to turn to cheap and illegal ways to get alcohol, which makes it more likely that they will drink something bad and accidentally poison themselves.