The poisoner's handbook
murder and the birth of forensic medicine in jazz age New York
by Deborah Blum · first published 2010
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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
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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…
on “How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer” ↗…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-...
on “Inventors killed by their own inventions” ↗…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
on “Ask HN: What are your favourite history books?” ↗…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
on “Ask HN: Book recommendations” ↗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,…
on “How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer (2013)” ↗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…
on “Marijuana Majority Website Highlights Celebs And Tech Leaders Who Support Pot” ↗