Methyl alcohol is toxic in its own right, as Gettler noted, but formic acid is at least six times more deadly. Further, methyl alcohol metabolizes comparatively slowly, lingering in the body. The conversion to the “more dangerous poisons” can take up to five days, meaning that the wood alcohol drinker can stew in an increasingly lethal cocktail for the better part of a week. Gettler wanted doctors to be aware of, and to watch for, the pattern of a wood alcohol death: a sudden sense of weakness, severe abdominal pain and vomiting, blindness, a slip into unconsciousness, heart failure. He wanted
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