I just finished reading a truly great true crime book: The Poisoner's Handbook. Okay, so you know I love histories and science. And crime. Forensics makes me geek just a little. But, this book... I'm telling you, this book would really encourage anyone to get their geek on.
Set against the backdrop of Prohibition, Deborah Blum offers the reader a look at the --at the time-- emerging science of forensics and forensic chemistry. The era and the New York Medical Examiner's office has no dearth of fine examples of cases about the changing understanding about chemistry and the human condition occurring at that time. High profile cases and lesser known ones swirl about the narrative as Blum tells us about the Chief Medical Examiner himself and his lead chemist.
A number of the cases mentioned were familiar to me, but admittedly, I'd never made the connection to period and location. Seeing them in this book was like finding new meaning and context. I'd read about the Radium Watch Painters before; I think I'd heard about Mike the Durable somewhere, although I'd never known his name. I vaguely remember my mother and my grandmother warning me not to touch old flypaper because of the poisons that they used to be saturated with. But, these and other things were brought together in a whole new way in this book: pieces of a puzzle put together that I hadn't realized were puzzle pieces.
While the subject got me excited, the writing style certainly helped to sustain a reading speed I don't think I've matched since my high school days (or maybe that night in college when I finished an entire Harry Potter in one night......). It really brought to life a time of great change in society, social norms, and the way people looked at science, the science of crime, and criminalistic sciences.
The book did leave me with one question though, Mrs. B, and I mean no disrespect: how in Hades is it that the human race didn't make itself extinct before now; how did our parents' parents survive long enough to conceive? With "health tonics" like Radithor and medicines like Bismosal, with poisons masquerading as gin and whiskey, with coal gas illuminated homes, it seems like a minor miracle. It brings to my mind other questions, things that get waaay too far off topic, but then, that's what I do: crazy questions.
Anyway, Mrs. B. Please, read this book. And pass it on to the scientifically and historically curious. Who knows, maybe the infection will spread.
Just don't treat it with radium.
Or mercury.
-Odd
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