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by
Deborah Blum
In one remarkable case in New York, a physician had killed his wife with morphine and then put belladonna drops into her eyes to counter the telltale contraction of her pupils. He was convicted only after Columbia University chemist Rudolph Witthaus, one of the authors of the 1896 text, demonstrated the process to the jury by killing a cat in the courtroom using the same gruesome technique. There was as much showmanship as science, Witthaus admitted; toxicology remained a primitive field of research filled with “questions still unanswerable.”
“Burglar uses Chloroform: Attacks a Woman in a Flat, Robs Her and Cuts off her Hair,” read one New York Times headline in March 1900.
Yet the scientific journals supported Mors’s confession. One study of 52 chloroform deaths, done only a few years earlier, found that four people had died in less than a minute, and 22 of them had died in less than five minutes.
Chloroform victims could be slightly yellow in color, showing signs of jaundice, due to the poison’s ability to wreak havoc in the liver.
On January 31, 1918, Hylan appointed Bellevue’s Charles Norris as the new medical examiner.
“The refined wood alcohol tastes like ethyl [grain] alcohol and, moreover is considerably cheaper,” Gettler wrote, “hence the adulterator buys the latter, ignorant that severe poisoning, blindness and often death lurk within it.”
WHETHER SWALLOWED or inhaled, all members of the cyanide family kill in the same way—they shut down the body’s ability to carry or absorb oxygen.
autopsy, the blood shows such a dark red that it sometimes appears purple. The veins leading from lung to heart are engorged with blood—evidence of the heart’s desperate efforts to circulate more and more blood as the body seeks desperately for any stray trace of oxygen.
The lessons were hard to miss: poisoners were hard to catch and even harder to convict.
Smith had once jumped into icy water so that Einstein could rush him into a bar and beg a drink for a freezing man. They then busted the bar. They had posed as football players (when arresting an ice cream vendor who sold gin out of his cart), Texas Rangers, a Yiddish couple (Smith playing the wife), streetcar conductors, gravediggers, fishermen, and ice men. Einstein—who had a booming baritone—once introduced himself as an opera singer and gave a rousing performance in a speakeasy before closing it down.
Not for decades would molecular biologists work out the method by which arsenic targets key enzymes, disrupting metabolism within cells throughout the body, breaking the system down cell by poisoned cell.
That brilliant scatter effect prompted alchemists to nickname the metal “quicksilver” and to formally name it Mercury, for the fleet-footed Roman messenger god.
As medical accounts of the 1920s noted, mercury bichloride was so corrosive, so irritating, that it could destroy tissue to the point that teeth loosened in the mouth, and the stomach eroded into a mass of bleeding ulcers.
He’d watched the coke ignite with a beautiful blue-violet flame, a color that scientists would later realize was a signature of carbon monoxide as it burned.
Its structure, known as a heme, resembles a bright cluster of protein balls around a darker iron core.
The iron in hemoglobin stains red blood cells, giving them that deep crimson color even as the protein itself efficiently moves oxygen through the body.
cyanide or carbon monoxide. Both poisons attach to hemoglobin far more effectively than oxygen.
Death created its own bleak protective shield; without breath, carbon monoxide was just another gas aimlessly swirling in the air.
With methyl alcohol, the period of cheerful inebriation was shorter; the sensation of a hangover could come within an hour or two.
The enzymes in the liver that neatly dispatch ethyl alcohol struggle with methyl. As a result, the more poisonous version lingers in the system, simmers longer in the organs, and metabolizes away only slowly. And as it stews, it becomes more poisonous. The primary by-products of methyl alcohol in the human body, as chemists had discovered, are formaldehyde and formic acid.
First, their vision would blur. The optic nerve and retina are acutely vulnerable to formic acid salts.
the breakdown of pulmonary tissue was what usually killed people.
The plotting of Snyder’s murder—by his charming wife, Ruth, and her doting boyfriend, Judd Gray, was so bizarre that the novelist James M. Cain would later use it as a basis for his two best-known novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.
But once inside the body, as Martland would soon realize, alpha radiation creates a precisely engineered internal poisoning.
But where calcium strengthens the mineral content of the skeleton, radium does the opposite. It bombards skeletal material with alpha radiation, blasting bony material full of tiny holes, then larger ones, then larger still.
And its affinity for the bones explains precisely why jaws rotted away, hips broke, and ankles crumbled, why anemias and leukemias bubbled in the bone marrow.
She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a disease caused when bone marrow is so damaged that it can no longer renew the body’s supply of blood cells.
Some fancier alcohols have more complicated structures, containing, for instance, more carbon atoms. But such elaborate alcohols were never destined to become the stuff of drinking legends, the magic ingredient in a golden brandy and soda, a copper-hued scotch and water, because they aren’t water soluble. It turns out that the extra carbon interferes with the molecular mixing process.
Like most alcohols, ethyl is an irritant—too much will inflame the stomach enough to induce nausea and vomiting.
Chronic drinking, chronic irritation and dehydration can eventually lead to long-term damage, especially to the liver, which does most of the work in breaking down the alcohol so that it can be moved out of the body.
It chewed through a specific series of nerve cells in the spinal cord, the anterior horn cells. These were motor neurons; researchers would later find that people suffering from ALS suffered damage in these same cells.
The liver generated more enzymes to break the alcohol down. More liquor was processed out, so less entered the bloodstream. It thus took longer for an intoxicating amount to accumulate and reach the brain.
In high doses, nicotine is a terrible poison—it blisters its way through tissues, burns a path from mouth to stomach, and induces intense vomiting, rapidly followed by convulsions and then a complete shutdown of the nervous system.
