43 pages • 1 hour read
Deborah BlumThe Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Failures of Prohibition
The rise and fall of Prohibition serve as a backdrop to The Poisoner’s Handbook’s main narrative of how Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler established forensic medicine in New York in the 1920s. Blum explores how Norris and Gettler’s work intersected with Prohibition, lending them unique insight into its social efficacy and transforming them into key figures in Prohibition’s history.
Prohibition was the result of a long campaign by temperance advocates to pressure the United States government into completely banning liquor. These activists were often conservative Christians and joined groups such as the Anti-Saloon League, which argued that rampant drunkenness was a social ill that needed to be stamped out. By the time Charles Norris became chief medical examiner in 1917, the 18th Amendment had already passed through Congress, after which it had to be ratified by two-thirds of the states. Norris and Gettler’s work placed them in direct contact with deaths occurring in New York City, and they were acutely aware of how many New Yorkers were dying of alcohol poisoning prior to Prohibition. Most of these deaths were due to the consumption of methyl alcohol, a toxic industrial alcohol that was an ingredient in bootlegged liquors. Gettler issued a report arguing that Prohibition “will unquestionably lead to much ‘moonshining’” (39), and Norris held press conferences warning that Prohibition would only spur further drunkenness.
Prohibition went into effect in spite of their warnings. As the years went on, both Gettler and Norris believed that Prohibition was having the opposite of its intended effects. Would-be drinkers were seeking out secret backroom bars, where they would encounter much harder liquor than they would have in legal bars. Norris was particularly horrified by the government’s policy of requiring manufacturers to actively place poisons (whether methyl alcohol or otherwise) into their industrial alcohol. Though such a policy was meant to deter drinking, Norris believed that it amounted to the government’s participation in murder:
[The government] knows what the bootleggers are doing with it and yet it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States Government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes […] (155).
While Gettler provided the scientific evidence for Prohibition’s failures, Norris became an outspoken critic of the law, penning numerous articles arguing that Prohibition had only exacerbated America’s problem with liquor. Ultimately, Norris’s writings helped to shift American attitudes towards Prohibition, leading to the law’s eventual repeal in 1933.
The Dangers of Toxic Chemicals in Consumer Products
Throughout The Poisoner’s Handbook, Blum describes a number of key social transformations that were occurring in the 1920s as American cities became increasingly modernized. One of these social shifts was the rise of “industrial innovation,” in which newly discovered chemicals were quickly used to create new consumer products. Often, the discovery of new chemicals was accompanied by rumors that they contained magical curative properties. Such was the case after Marie Curie discovered the radioactive element radium in 1900. Physicians quickly declared radium to have “miraculous” healing abilities, and companies began churning out a number of easily obtainable creams and medicines that contained radium as an ingredient, despite the chemical still being poorly understood. However, even when chemicals were well-known to be poisonous, companies would still place them in their products. For instance, thallium was an active ingredient in body creams marketed towards women although the chemical was a highly toxic agent.
Blum paints a picture of modern life in which exposure to toxic chemicals was a daily occurrence:
There were times, and they came frequently enough, when one could believe that modern society, machine-age America, was addicted to poisons. Every day retold the story of that dependency: poisons floated in the exhaust-smudged air of the morning commute and swam in the evening martini […] (245).
In Blum’s view, Americans’ partaking of toxic substances went beyond mere ignorance. Instead, she describes it as an addiction, as if many Americans harbored a secret desire to consume poisons. In discussing Prohibition-era parties, Blum emphasizes that much of the attraction of drinking stemmed from the risks that the practice entailed. Most New Yorkers were aware that bootlegged liquor or moonshine frequently contained poisonous forms of alcohol. However, these drinkers participated in cocktail parties regardless, with the possibility of death seeming to add a dark thrill to the practice.
The Struggle to Establish Forensic Science
Much of The Poisoner’s Handbook is focused around Gettler and Norris’s quest to have forensic science accepted as a valid discipline that provided useful analysis for crime scene investigations. When Norris created a forensic chemistry lab in 1917, it was the first of its kind in the country. Though there were already some scientific tests for identifying poisons in a cadaver, there was nothing close to a comprehensive understanding of how poisons interact with the body. Blum describes Gettler as essentially creating the field of forensic science, inventing tests for identifying poisons whenever a new chemical was discovered or became available to purchase. Gettler sought to fully discover how poisons operated, and he undertook frequent studies to investigate such questions as how long a poison remained in the body after death.
Blum also describes how Norris and Gettler’s work was limited to developing the methods for forensic science. Forensic science was poorly understood by the general public, so when Gettler was called upon to testify in criminal trials, his evidence was easily critiqued by defense attorneys. A crucial trial was that surrounding the murder of Fremont and Annie Jackson, who Gettler argued showed clear signs of being poisoned by the cyanide present in fumigation gas. However, the defense attorneys claimed that Gettler’s analysis was based in faulty science—an argument that the jury sided with. Gettler and Norris emerged from this trial determined to raise forensic science’s profile with the general public. Norris focused on publicly advocating for the science, while Gettler undertook comprehensive studies of poisons to ensure that his analysis was safe from critiques. By the era when The Poisoner’s Handbook’s story ends, forensic science had become widely accepted by most Americans. Blum argues that “this dramatic shift in popular opinion was made possible by […] Norris’s and Gettler’s often thankless work” (272).
