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

In the late 19th century, scientists studying the Earth’s rocks discovered that “Some sizzled with energy and even emitted radiation” (178). As Pierre and Marie Curie ran laboratory tests to discover why the rocks were behaving this way, they discovered the elements polonium and radium, which both had the property of “emit[ing] particles.” Radium immediately became a medical sensation, with doctors believing that exposure to radium could aid in curing diseases. As doctors claimed radium’s effects to be “miraculous,” companies began churning out a bevy of wellness products that contained radium, including “radium water […] radium soda, [and] radium candy” (179). German scientists also discovered the ability to use radium for industrial purposes, deriving a “self-luminous paint” that could be used to make surfaces glow in the dark (180).

Despite radium’s purported healing properties, New Jersey’s medical examiner, Harrison Stanford Martland, began investigating the element in the 1920s, believing it to be more harmful than previously realized. Martland’s interest in the element was piqued by a number of deaths occurring at the United States Radium Corporation’s factory in Orange, New Jersey. At the factory, “teenage girls and young women” painted radium paint onto watches (181). The workers would “shape their brushes with their lips” (180), ingesting bits of radium each time. After some of the girls fell ill and died, their bones disintegrating over a number of years, Martland investigated how radium affected the human body. Martland discovered that radium releases three different kinds of radiation: alpha, beta, and gamma. Though alpha radiation is typically harmless when airborne, inside of the human body it causes severe damage to bodily tissues. Due to radium’s similarity to the element calcium, the majority of radium “is deposited into the bones” (185). Once there, it slowly erodes the bones until they completely disintegrate.

Martland’s report spurred a number of the US Radium Corporation’s former employees, who were all suffering from signs of radiation poisoning, to sue the company. In 1928, Martland contacted Charles Norris for assistance in analyzing the bones of a dead employee to determine whether radiation had killed her. Norris assigned Gettler to analyze the bones, and Gettler devises a test “for radioactivity.” The test involved wrapping the bones in X-ray film, which would show spots if the bones were radioactive. At the end of the test, the film “showed a dazzle of pale spots” (188), indicating that the employee had absorbed a heavy amount of radiation. The Radium Corporation’s attorneys argued that the employees had exceeded the “statute of limitations” by not suing when they first ingested the radium (188). In response, the employees’ attorneys used Gettler’s research to argue that radium’s deadly effects were only evident years after initial exposure, prompting the Radium Corporation to settle outside of court. 

Though the Prohibition years saw many New Yorkers die from drinking toxic methyl alcohol, Gettler was also tallying cases in which drinkers had “been killed instead by so-called good liquor” (197), otherwise known as ethyl alcohol. Ethyl and methyl alcohol have similar chemical structures, composed of “the three most important atoms on Earth […] carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen” (198). In spite of their similarities, the different arrangements of the same atoms yields both deadly poison (methyl alcohol) and a mostly harmless drink (ethyl alcohol). However, ethyl alcohol can still wreak havoc on the human body when consumed in excessive amounts, harming the brain structure and sometimes leading to death. Gettler decided to systematically examine how alcohol behaves in the human body.

Gettler studied thousands of corpses from New York’s morgue with the aim of comparing individuals who had died from drinking with those who had died of natural causes. One of Gettler’s first topics of investigation was how much alcohol the brain needs to absorb for a person to become intoxicated. Gettler devised a test that involved “minc[ing] chunks of brain” and then using “alcohol analysis devices” to determine what level of alcohol was present (208). By comparing the brains of those who had died of natural causes with those who died of drinking, Gettler devised a scale that reported how alcohol affects the human body. The scale was divided into four levels indicated by + signs, with one + referring to an alcoholic content of “below 0.1 percent” and four +’s indicating an individual with “0.4 to 0.6 percent alcoholic content” (210). Individuals in the highest ranking “had consumed so much liquor that they succumbed to ethyl alcohol poisoning” and typically had died from it (210).

Gettler also created a study to examine whether drinkers could develop an immunity to alcohol’s effects by repeated consumption of liquor. Gettler fed 12 dogs ethyl alcohol until the dogs had been “habituated to alcohol” (213). He then noted how these dogs responded to alcohol in comparison to dogs who had never consumed liquor. The dogs who had never consumed alcohol before tended to show a greater reaction to alcohol, and analysis of their bodies revealed that they had absorbed a higher amount of “alcohol content.” While such results suggested that the “habituated dogs” had built up a slight tolerance to alcohol, Gettler also noted that these dogs showed signs of drunkenness after ingesting an amount of more than 0.25 percent alcoholic content. Gettler concluded that no such “magical immunity” was possible and that even long-time drinkers were susceptible to alcohol’s bodily effects.

Though Gettler’s toxicological research was helping New York’s police in solving numerous investigations, Norris felt that his medical examiner office continued to be undervalued by the New York government. Throughout his time running the office, he continually fought with the mayor over receiving enough funding. When Joseph McKee was appointed acting mayor in 1932, he immediately targeted New York’s budget, “order[ing] every department in the city, without exception, to cut its budget by 20 percent” (220). Norris resigned from his post, believing that the mayor had slashed the budget so severely that the medical examiner’s office could no longer properly do its job. However, Norris quickly grew bored of retirement and agreed to return as chief medical examiner in exchange for an increased budget.