The Poisoner’s Handbook

Did you know that radium gets absorbed into the human body by disguising itself as calcium? Did you know that carbon monoxide poisoning leaves its victims’ blood an unnaturally vivid scarlet? Did you know that strychnine poisoning makes the victim’s insides look like they got mauled by a bear?

                  Did you know someone wrote a book about all this?

                  It’s called The Poisoner’s Handbook, and the author is Deborah Blum.

                  If you’ve read this far, I assume you are fascinated by forensics. Excellent. This book is about the growth and development of forensic medicine during the 1920’s in New York City. The 20s are always depicted as a glamorous era – the jazz, the bootleg alcohol, the flappers and the gangsters – but this book delves into the criminal underside of it, graphically describing the poisons people drank when they were desperate for alcohol and how people would poison their own friends and relatives to get money ; poison in those days was relatively difficult to detect in a body.

                  However, when medical examiner Charles Norris took the office, he did his best to change this. He ran experiments with every new kind of poison until he could detect a minute amount from a couple of grams of flesh. He worked at all hours of the day and night to catch criminals.

                  Of course, the fact that poisons became easier to detect didn’t mean that people stopped poisoning others. It just meant that they came up with more creative methods. I can’t go into detail here because, well, this is the Internet and everyone is reading this, but suffice to say this book will make you incredibly paranoid about accepting gifts from others for a while.

                  I enjoyed this book because, although it is, in essence, a history of science book, it doesn’t read like one. Instead, in Deborah Blum’s hands, the historical figures take on personalities and stories of their own, and even the criminals are fully fleshed out and frighteningly real figures. This is one of those books you will stay up all night to finish, and a book that will stay on your mind for weeks after you’re done.

 Feyga Saksonov