Take Mike the Durable,as New York Citynewspapers in 1933 called him (after his durability had run out). Mike Malloywas a frail, drink-sodden wretch whom fellow barflies determined to kill forthe insurance money. Trouble was, Mike resisted dying, despite being fedpoisonous booze and a sandwich of rotting sardines, ground glass and metalshavings, and later being soaked in icy water on a cold night and run down by acar.
Finally he succumbed tocarbon monoxide from a gas lamp. But the murderers, none a criminal mastermind,were quickly found out and nearly as quickly tried, found guilty and executed.
The grimly comicanecdote of Malloy is typical of cases, both odd and fearsome, that Blum usesto illustrate the development of forensic science in New York and the United States during the first four decades of the20th century. The story, engagingly written and extensively researched, isstructured around the heroic efforts of Charles Norris, named the city’s firstprofessional medical examiner in 1918, working with Alexander Gettler, aHungarian immigrant who eventually became the country’s leading toxicologist,to improve the standing of toxicology in both advancing public health andsolving crimes.
It is a considerableunderstatement to say that the men were dedicated to their work; Norris, from aprominent family, often used his own funds to pay staff salaries and buyequipment. They had need of dedication, for they started at a time of corruptand incompetent coroners, when the United Stateswas far behind Europe in forensicinvestigation and regulation of food, drugs and poisonous elements.
The author divides herbook into poisons, devoting a chapter (sometimes two) to each: chloroform,methyl (or wood) alcohol, cyanide, arsenic, mercury, carbon monoxide, radium,ethyl (or grain) alcohol and thallium. Famous crimes are connected with many ofthem, probably the most famous being the 1927 Snyder-Gray case in which RuthSnyder and her lover Judd Gray murdered her husband in a frenzy of overkillusing a sash weight, picture wire and bichloride of mercury.
But criminals weren’tthe only culprits. Poisons were in the air we breathed, water we drank andcommercial products we used or ingested. Mercury compounds, for example, weresold as bedbug killers, laxatives, antiseptics and diuretics.
The different ways thatelements sicken and kill are gruesomely fascinating. Among the worst is radium,once widely used in liniments and other health aids and to illuminate clockfaces. Workers handling radium eventually became literal physical wrecks, theirbones shattering.
Businesses profitingfrom radium, like those selling other poisons, refused to acknowledge theelement’s danger and went to court to fight compensating their dying formerworkers. It took the death of a wealthy, prominent industrialist from drinkinga radium-dosed tonic for the government to begin restricting radium.
Norris and Gettlerimmensely advanced toxicology, forensic science and the public health. Theywere, Blum writes, “revolutionaries who worked in civil service” and “changedthe poison game.”
Norris died in 1935.Gettler, whose chemistry had decided the outcome of many trials, retired in1959 from a career that involved examining more than 100,000 bodies and died in1968.
