Shared Reads

Despite its provocative title, The Poisoner’s Handbook, by Deborah Blum, will not help one dispose of moles, voles or any other pesky, unwanted creatures. Instead, what it does is provide a lively account of the professionalization of New York City’s coroner’s office in the first part of the 20th Century with a particular emphasis on toxicology.

Dr. Charles Norris was the man charged with bringing modernity to the office which, before that, was a haven of patronage with no particular medical knowledge required. Dr. Norris was a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s School of Medicine. He had studied pathology and bacteriology in Germany and Vienna and upon his return to New York he worked first as a lecturer in Pathology at Columbia and then as a lab director at Bellevue and Allied Hospitals. His love of research served him well as he both invented and improved upon methods for detecting any number of toxic substances. 

Dr. Norris, a former athlete, was born to a wealthy family who instilled in him a strict sense of civic duty. Each of these qualities served him well as he not only furnished and equipped a professional medical examiner’s office at his own expense he at different times had to cope with austerity measures that caused the city to eliminate clocks and transportation for the coroner’s office. 

Dr. Norris, along with the majority of medical examiners in the US, opposed Prohibition which was inexorable ossifying its way into the Constitution at the same time Dr. Norris was struggling to bring the coroner’s office into the 20th Century. Dr. Norris and his colleagues warned that the prohibition of alcohol sales would lead people to concoct their own home brews which would invariable lead to a rise in poisoning deaths through consumption of ethyl and methyl alcohol. When this prediction came true, Dr. Norris and his colleagues petitioned the federal government to take steps to render denatured alcohol less toxic. The government responded by making denatured alcohol more toxic, reasoning that the person who knowingly consumes illegal alcohol was, in the words of Wayne Wheeler of the politically powerful Anti-Saloon League of America, “in the same category as the man who walks into a drug store, buys a bottle of carbolic acid with a label on it marked ‘poisonous’ and drinks the contents.” The fact the Federal government would knowingly poison its own citizens, who they first rendered as a new criminal class, was eye-opening to me.

Another interesting case discussed was the “Radium Girls.” Radium had been discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie and it was immediately perceived as a miracle cure for any number of diseases and conditions as well as having many industrial and cosmetic uses. One of these industrial uses was making the dials of clocks and watches glow in the dark. I had read something about the Radium Girls in the past, in a book of Ripley Believe It Or Nots, I believe, and knew the girls had been poisoned from licking the brushes they used to apply the radium paint to the dials. The Poisoner’s Handbook adds so much to this tale. Not only did the women lick their paintbrushes to a fine point, something they were taught to do by management, but they also decorated themselves, painting their nails, hair and clothes, so they would glow in the dark as well. The Radium Girls began to drop dead but first their jawbones splintered, their teeth fell out and they began to suffer with debilitating anemia. The company behind the glow in the dark dials, U.S. Radium Corporation, hired a team of Harvard scientists to investigate and the Harvard scientists concluded that the death of the Radium Girls were connected but not caused by their employment and so was launched a was launched a lawsuit that was eventually settled when the body of a Radium Girl who had been dead five years still showed high levels of radioactivity in all her bones and tissue.

Another fascinating case that sort of bookends the book involves a brilliant young chemist hired by Charles Norris, Alexander Gettler, who testified in the 1923 murder trials of a 24-year-old woman named Mary Frances Avery Creighton who stood accused alongside her husband John of murdering her own younger brother for insurance money. When Raymond Avery died a doctor listed “gastroenteritis” as the cause of death and there it might have lain except for an anonymous letter that piqued the interest of the local police. The body of Raymond Avery was autopsied and a large amount of arsenic was found. The couple was tried and found not guilty of this charge but as soon as they were released Mary Frances was arrested again and charged with poisoning her mother-in-law, Anna Creighton, whose death had also been listed as “gastroenteritis”. Alexander Gettler testified in that trial that what appeared to be arsenic crystals was actually the by-product of bismuth and within the space of three weeks Mary Francis Avery Creighton would once again be found not guilty of murder. Flash forward 13 years and Mary Frances Creighton was once again on trial for her life in a sensational murder case where she was accused of poisoning Ada Appelgate, wife of their housemate, Everett Appelgate, so that Everett could marry the Creighton’s 15-year-old daughter, Ruth. This time Mary Frances Creighton, along with co-defendant Everett Appelgate, was found guilty and executed in New York State’s electric chair at Sing Sing prison on July 13, 1936. Before she died Mary Frances would confess that she had indeed poisoned her brother for his insurance payout.

The Poisoner’s Handbook is filled with such stories and I would highly recommend this book to anyone who appreciates coroners, science, toxicology, medicine, history or who just enjoys a ripping good yarn. The author is a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer who teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin Madison and wisely uses a device where she will name a chapter for a particular substance and then back it up with real life examples. In doing so Ms. Blum both educates and entertains. This book is available at the Owen County Public Library. Check it out!

~ Laura Wilkerson

   August 18, 2010