More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Deborah Blum
Read between
October 19 - October 26, 2025
No scientist really considers carbon dioxide a poison, not in the routine sense of the word. It is a natural by-product of the human metabolic process, among other things.
“This brings up a rather interesting possibility for a method of murder that would be extremely difficult to detect,” the doctor, Edward Marten, continued. “I pass this on, for what it is worth, to writers of detective stories.”
CO is relatively rare in nature—it forms in the wake of lightning strikes, forest and grass fires, and any event that causes a carbon-rich fuel to burn.
CO is a substance naturally occurring in the mammalian body. wrong thinking
Not only were people drinking more under Prohibition, he said, but with full government complicity they were imbibing alcohol that hardly deserved the name.
No wonder the newest nickname for the stuff coming from the tenement stills and grocery store moonshiners was “white mule”: the clear liquid, it was said, left the drinker feeling kicked in the head.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press called the government “an accessory to murder when it uses deadly denaturants.”
why would people persist in drinking white mule and Smoke, paint shop hooch and bathtub gin, when they must know that it could kill them?
speakeasy patrons didn’t appreciate the risk.
“pure,” in this case, did not mean “safe.” In the case of methanol, it meant purely “poisonous.”
If a drinker cared to notice, the first difference between methyl and grain (ethyl) alcohol was in how long the buzz lasted. With methyl alcohol, the period of cheerful inebriation was shorter; the sensation of a hangover could come within an hour or two.
Norris, in response, argued that this imposition of one group’s personal beliefs on the rest of society could not be justified as moral.
ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1927, a young woman named Ruby Gonzales came into Manhattan for a doctor’s appointment. She was a waitress in Asbury Park, New Jersey, the hardworking single mother of a five-year-old girl. Gonzales brought her small daughter to the appointment as well as her boyfriend, an adding machine salesman who worked in the city. The appointment was for an abortion, wholly illegal, wholly secret, and twenty-seven-year-old Gonzales was nervous enough to want her boyfriend for support. And really, she had no choice but to bring her daughter.
BACK AT THE MORGUE, the pathologists found this story, let’s say, unbelievable. They’d seen plenty of bungled abortions; this body had all the signs of a woman mangled by a hurried or incompetent doctor. She’d bled to death in the doctor’s brownstone office—and no wonder.
Whether one agreed with the anti-abortion laws or not—and in those days most did—the medical examiners were tired of doctors getting away with butchering patients.
ON JANUARY 12, 1928, having lost every legal appeal, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray went to the electric chair.
Ruth Snyder’s fans—she’d received 164 marriage proposals while in prison—shouted curses and pleas at the gates.
The photographer had muscled his way into the first pew and caught an unobstructed view of Ruth Snyder’s body rattling with electricity. The Daily News placed a single word over the photo: “Dead!”
Fearing that its prized photographer, Tom Howard, might be arrested, the Chicago paper sent him straight from New York to an assignment in Cuba.
Howard’s first thought was that the Marines had come to take him to jail. But it turned out the troops merely wanted to celebrate his Marine-worthy daring.
MARTLAND FOUND radium to be neither beautiful nor inspirational. He’d been drawn into researching it by a peculiar health crisis in Orange, New Jersey, a community just northwest of Newark.
The U.S. Radium Corporation, which had opened a plant there in 1917, was busier than ever.
Driven by military need, watch companies began putting watches on straps, which could be safely buckled onto wrists, and they looked for a way to make watch faces glow in the dark.
“self-luminous” paint.
The bones belonged to an Italian-American, Amelia Maggia, dead at twenty-five, who had worked as a dial painter for four years.
The report displayed Gettler’s usual obsessive need to verify his results in multiple ways. He accompanied the film tests with results from experiments that relied on other techniques.
Gettler and Muller would later find an even more theatrical way to demonstrate the danger of radium in bones. In a tube attached to a Geiger counter, they placed a piece of bone from their Radium Girl.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY convention in Houston that June was, as always, an excellent party. All enjoyed it except for the New York delegates, who had very specific instructions to behave and not to drink in public. As humorist Will Rogers, who was covering the conference, wrote, the New
Yorkers were pitiful, just pitiful. “They all say ‘Why pick on us to be the only sober ones here?’
The answer to that was obvious. New York governor Al Smith had a real chance at the...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In Rogers’s words, “The whole talk down here is wet and dry; the delegates just can’t wait till the next bottle is opened to discuss it.”
Democrats might even position themselves as the party opposed to punitive alcohol regulations. By the convention’s end, aided by his alcohol-deprived colleagues, Smith had succeeded in his quest and was the Democratic candidate for U.S. President. In the November election he would face Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, a reform-minded Republican backed by pro-Prohibition partisans. AS THE ELECTION approached, Rogers’s perspective on the nation’s illicit love affair with alcohol lost some of its lightheartedness. In a letter to the New York Times, musing on the perpetual danger now posed
...more
“Practically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic,” because practically all the liquor was redistilled denatured alcohol. “Whether they call it smoke, or white mule or put in some flavoring and call it gin, the effect is the same.”
For his part, Norris put most of the blame elsewhere. Gettler’s latest tests had found the lethal bite not only of methyl alcohol but of the government’s determined,
ever-expanding use of poisonous additives: aldehol, pyridine, benzene, diethyl phlatate, nicotine, mercury, aniline, phenols.
“Prohibition is a joke,” Norris said flatly. “I invite both Presidential candidates to see the noble experiment in extermination. The medical examiners cannot stop these dea...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
During her second radium tour, Curie went to a dinner for Thomas Edison, hosted by Henry Ford; she planted a “radium maple” in a park in Westchester County; the New York City Women’s Federation awarded her their medal of honor; and she dedicated the Hall of Chemistry at St. Lawrence University, where she received an honorary degree.
In the midst of that eddying cycle of panic and death, Norris made what he always considered one of his worst mistakes as medical examiner.
conspiracy leaked to the newspapers, embarrassing them all. No one apparently more than Norris—he was, at least, the only member of the cover-up to apologize publicly.
he should have shown more respect for the good citizens who patronized the Country Trust Company. The result of the Riordan fiasco, he feared, was more mistrust, a sense that the medical examiner’s office was willing to conspire with the city’s elite. “I accept responsibility for the delay,” Norris said in a spare public statement that helped put an end to the controversy.
Norris blamed himself for forgetting one of his cardinal rules, that medical examiners should never be swayed by politicians. He wouldn’t forget again.
All three deaths wove together in a pattern recognizable to any forensic chemist. The party boy, the old alcoholic, and the drunken laborer—none of them, as Gettler’s analyses would prove, died from imbibing the notoriously dangerous methyl alcohol.
killed instead by so-called good liquor: whiskey made intoxicating and toxic by ethyl alcohol.
Thanks to the government’s deliberate poisoning of alcoholic spirits people had seemingly forgotten that li...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“From almost every standpoint ethyl alcohol must be regarded as the most important poison with which medical men and jurists have to deal,” Gettler wrote in
might believe this work was unnecessary, but the new generation of forensic toxicologists knew better.
SO DID the country’s insurance agencies.
In early 1930 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company reported that deaths due to alcoholism were now 600 percent higher (among its 19 million policyholders) than those tallied in 1920, the first year that consumption of alcohol was prohibited. These
statistics suggested that Prohibition had fostered a nation of heavy drinkers and that the habit was killing thousands of people.
Arguably the three most important atoms on Earth are carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
Oxygen is vital to keeping carbon-based life forms alive, barring a few odd creatures like anaerobic bacteria. And if two hydrogen atoms attach to a single oxygen atom, the result—H2O—is that gloriously necessary liquid called water.
