The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

by Deborah Blum

Brooklyn district attorney John Ruston

“Human life must be cheap to the one who can place the dollar above it,”

“Even if prohibition were not a law, still the distribution of such a poisonous concoction would be a crime that every law-abiding citizen should cry out to have avenged.”

Posing as factory workers, Red Murphy and Daniel Kriesberg rented a room in a nearby boardinghouse. True, it had only a bed and no other furniture, but the room was lit by gaslight; the nozzle for the illuminating gas

MALLOY HAD withstood ethyl alcohol, methyl alcohol, rotten fish, fermented oysters, broken glass, metal slivers, an ice-water soaking, and an automobile ambush. But carbon monoxide was something else again. Later Murphy would estimate that it took less than five

minutes before Malloy was dead.

IN APRIL 1933 legal beer (3.2 percent alcohol by weight) made its triumphant, celebrated, long-awaited return.

“the wet majority of a thirsty nation.”

“To the memory of Charles Norris, First Chief Medical Examiner of The City of New York.”

Alexander Gettler remained New York City’s chief toxicologist until January 1, 1959, retiring at the age of seventy-five. The mandatory retirement age was seventy, but the city approved a special dispensation in his case.

“If any one person deserves the appellation ‘father of toxicology and forensic chemistry in the United States,’ it is Dr. Gettler.”

all of Gettler’s tests were done with what toxicologists now call “wet” chemistry, relying on test tubes and Bunsen burners, beakers and body parts.

greater challenge to Alexander Gettler, at a time when everything depended on the scientist’s intuition and inventiveness—and absolute understanding of chemical reactions.

In a 1955 profile, “The Man Who Reads Corpses,” published in Harper’s, the writer described the toxicologist as “a crusty, precise man of seventy, barely saved from an air of primness by an everpresent cigar.”

interest in his former students and assistants never abated,”

our medicine relies on countless toxic compounds—and in deliberate evil.