Historical Toxicology (OLD TIMEY POISONS) with Deborah Blum

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Speaker 1 Oh, hey, it's the moldy pumpkin you carved a little too early. Allie Ward, let's enjoy some poisons.
I love this guest.

Speaker 1 I first met her at a book reading over 10 years ago, and I have always enjoyed so much her historical science writing.

Speaker 1 She studied chemistry, but she majored in journalism, more on that in a bit, and got a master's degree in environmental journalism, went on to write a whole stack of books like Monkey Wars and Ghost Hunters, William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, and of course, the beloved The Poisoner's Handbook, Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age, New York.

Speaker 1 And she also authored the recent Technical Guide to Science Journalism and is writing a new book as we spoke. And how good is she? She's a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Speaker 1 She will tell us all about the history of toxicology and the poisons of then and now.

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Okay, so toxicology, it means poison.

Speaker 1 It comes from old French and Latin words for poisoned arrow, which came from an older word meaning a yew tree from which the bows were made.

Speaker 1 So toxins, toxic poisons, it's got some tree roots in there.

Speaker 1 So let's get into metal poisons, odorless poisons, toxic gases, iocaine powder, arsenic, old lace, poisons as self-defense, black mirrors, movie myths, and the start of testing for that which ails or kills you with author chemistry connoisseur and someone who really knows the history of toxicology, Deborah Blum.

Speaker 2 Deborah Blum, she, her.

Speaker 1 And you are my favorite historian of toxicology. I love your book, your books in general.
They're so beautifully written, and there's such a vibe.

Speaker 2 I'll take that.

Speaker 1 There's nothing better than being a vibe.

Speaker 1 Were you ever into like kind of spooky things or the dark side of things? Or was it the characters in history that really drove you to writing about these types of things?

Speaker 2 I mean, that's such an interesting question. Earlier, I wrote a book called Ghost Hunters, so definitely some of the dark and spooky things.
But for

Speaker 2 that, was more for me an exploration of what science can tell us about the unknown natural, right? I never think of it as the supernatural. I think of it as the natural we haven't figured out.

Speaker 2 And that's really fascinating to me. But poisons and chemistry are probably closest to my heart.
I'm a failed chemistry major and I find

Speaker 2 poisons themselves really fascinating in this kind of I'm going to animate them for a minute way. They're really clever chemical compounds, right?

Speaker 2 They trick our bodies bodies in all kinds of amazing ways. They're the most devious of all chemistry.

Speaker 2 And so the idea that you can match together both poisoners who are among the most devious murderers with compounds that are among the most devious in known chemistry is just endlessly fascinating to me to this day, in fact.

Speaker 1 What was it about chemistry that you loved so much or that you love so much?

Speaker 2 Well, I, you know, I'm a failed chemistry major, as I am, you know, frequently say to people, if I wasn't such a complete airheaded clutch in the lab, I might yet be a chemist.

Speaker 2 But I was like a complete walking human minefield in a laboratory when I was in college.

Speaker 2 Well, at the luster end, I set my hair on fire. And it was a great moment because that means the 1970s.
I had those classic long braids that anyone who was anyone had in the 1970s.

Speaker 2 And I was sitting around working at a beaker brewing up some poisonous brewer or the other, I suspect.

Speaker 2 And our lab advisor, who was an absolutely wonderful postdoc named Frank, came up and he goes in the calmest voice, Deborah, do you smell smoke?

Speaker 2 And I looked down and my brains were in the Bunsen burner.

Speaker 2 I should have married that guy, right?

Speaker 2 He was a perfect match for a human bottle rocket.

Speaker 2 But I also, in the same same kind of airheaded way, generated a complete poisonous cloud. They had to evacuate the laboratory.

Speaker 2 And it was that second that made me realize how dangerous I was, not only to myself, but others. And that led me to bail out of chemistry and then become a writer in the least inspiring way.

Speaker 2 I'm like, well, I'm not going to be a chemist, but I like to write. I guess I'll become a journalist.
I loved journalism.

Speaker 2 I had been saying to my agent for years, I want to write this book because I really wanted to write about chemistry.

Speaker 2 And the other probably the thing in the mix is I'm the daughter of an entomologist who specialized in venoms. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 He gave me a tarantula as a housewarming present when I was a student at the University of Georgia, right? Because they were actually studying tarantula venom in his lab at the time.

Speaker 2 And so I grew up with this real fascination with poisonous things that I probably was also just probably part of my childhood.

Speaker 2 All of that came together for me when I started thinking, and I really want to write about these uniquely fascinating compounds.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, Poisoner's Handbook, which is the story of two underpaid civil scientists in New York, was a story that had completely disappeared.

Speaker 2 So the other pleasure of writing about chemistry is bringing people back to life. They disappear.

Speaker 2 You know, our history is littered with people who were high-profile or stars of their field at the time, but we've since forgotten.

Speaker 2 And so it's just such a pleasure as someone who does history of science to say, let me bring this story back to life so you can see these people and what they did.

Speaker 1 Does it ever annoy you when people will use toxins and venoms or poison and venom interchangeably?

Speaker 2 Yes. Does that ever annoy you? Yeah, it does.

Speaker 2 So actually, the word toxic and the word poison are not interchangeable because toxins really refer to plant poisons and or naturally occurring poisons that are not mineral poisons, right?

Speaker 2 When you're talking about arsenic or antimony or lead or some of the other metallic poisons, those are actually not toxins. Toxins are venoms and plant alkaloids and things like that.

Speaker 2 And that really gets down into the geeky weeds of it, right? But sometimes, you know, I just want to say to people, just use the overall term poison. This is a poisonous thing, right?

Speaker 2 You know, then you're always guaranteed to be right. Right.

Speaker 1 I love that. I love having a little framework for it.
There's so many entomologists and snake people who are like, it's not a poisonous snake. It's a venomous snake.

Speaker 1 So I feel like that was drilled into me from entomologists and ecologists.

Speaker 2 But venoms actually are poisons, right? I'm comfortable with using these terms somewhat interchangeably if I think they're correct.

Speaker 1 Okay, so if you like ticky-tacky language facts or things that can kill you, we did discuss this exact thing in our Scorpiology episode with Dr.

Speaker 1 Lauren Esposito, and it was illuminating and visceral, so I'm just going to play you a clip from that. Are all scorpions poisonous? And I know that there's a poison-venom discussion to be had.

Speaker 3 There is. So no scorpions are poisonous because poison is something that's secreted and then when something else eats that thing, it makes them ill.

Speaker 3 All scorpions are venomous, which is something that's secreted and then injected into the destined host, like another animal.

Speaker 1 So there's a delivery apparatus for the venom.

Speaker 3 So all scorpions are venomous. Not all scorpions are venomous to humans because they don't necessarily have that mammal neurotoxin, but they're all venomous to something.

Speaker 1 If you ate scorpion venom, would it be poisonous?

Speaker 3 No, it's a protein and your stomach acid would denature it.

Speaker 1 So if you ate a scorpion, unless it stung you on the way down. Yeah.
You're good to go. You're good to go.
And then it would still be venomous venomous because it wouldn't be digested.

Speaker 1 So poison versus venom.

Speaker 3 But I would like not recommend eating a thumbtack. Okay.
So like in that sense, maybe not eat the stinger just because it's like sharp and I don't know what's going to do in your stomach.

Speaker 3 Like it seems like not a good, like not a good look for anyone.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and also let them live.

Speaker 2 Let them live. Can I live?

Speaker 1 Okay, so that was from Scorpiology. But the same goes for spiders.
We also have a pair of episodes on jellyfish and jellyfish venom.

Speaker 1 We have an episode on cone snails, which can end your life if you let them. Why don't snails have a skull and crossbones on them, you ask? Because they've been around for 50 million years.

Speaker 1 And the skull and crossbones as a death warning only goes back to like the 1850s.

Speaker 1 So the skull and crossbones motif was initially though a DIY project that people made from just plucking a skull from a pile of human bones, grabbing a couple femurs, maybe from different people, whatever you have lying around will do, and then popping that decor above a graveyard or an ossuary.

Speaker 1 And for more on that, we have a Metropolitan Tomology episode about catacombs.

Speaker 1 But the labeling of poisons with the skull and crossbones was also in vogue around the same time that chemists and pharmacists were putting potions into these dark blue glass bottles that were textured with bumps or ridges to give people both a visual and a tactile warning, kind of like the bright coloration of animals, like poison frogs or millipedes.

Speaker 1 And that's called aposematism. In Greek, it literally means away from me signal.
But do you like pirates of the Caribbean?

Speaker 1 So do children, which is why in the 1970s this sweet pediatrician in Pittsburgh campaigned to change the skull and crossbones poison warning to this pea soup green, kind of like an emoji with a scowling, gagging grimace and agonized shut eyes, as if he's both a victim and an executioner in his own toxicity.

Speaker 1 Aren't they all? So named Mr. Yuck, studies showed that that this mascot for poison was a really unappealing visual to kids.
Seemed like a slam duck.

Speaker 1 Mr.

Speaker 2 Yuck is mean.

Speaker 2 Mr. Yuck is real.

Speaker 1 But some things, no matter how good an idea they are, just don't stay in fashion, like cargo pants and vaccines.

Speaker 1 So we still use the skull and crossbones, despite it being surveyed as an appealing motif to kids. People love a sea plunderer, but I'm happy to report that the driving force behind Mr.
Yuck, Dr.

Speaker 1 Richard Moriarty, however, lived a long life. According to his 2023 obituary, he died peacefully at 83.
He survived by his loving husband.

Speaker 1 And according to this one memorial article I read, released by the University of Pittsburgh, his alma mater in his hometown, his husband David kept his spirits up in his final days by putting Mr.

Speaker 1 Yuck stickers in some surprise places, places, oftentimes on the back of hospital staff as kind of a, I guess, well, a gag. And the article notes that on the evening of Dr.

Speaker 1 Moriarty's funeral, Pittsburgh's skyline glowed in Mr. Yuck's signature verdant hue.
So Mr. Yuck may have been his green, ghastly Frankenstein, but he was anything but.

Speaker 1 What about you mentioned these mineral poisons, like metallic poisons? How do those work differently than, say, plant alkaloids or something that you're concocting in a lab?

Speaker 2 That's a really good question. So

Speaker 2 a lot of the sort of poisons that occur naturally in the Earth's crust, not all of them, but I'm going to stick with them for a minute, are metallic or metalloid poisons.

Speaker 2 Arsenic is, antimony is, obviously lead, copper can be poisonous. Silver has its poisonous qualities, even gold.

Speaker 2 And what's interesting about those from a kind of longer-term perspective, and which matters to us in terms of exposure, is almost all of these store in the body and bioaccumulate, right?

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 you know, if you're exposed to lead and it gets into your body, it doesn't go away. Lead tends to deposit to the bones, right?

Speaker 2 But if you're exposed to a plant alkaloid, cyanide, strychnine, they're volatile compounds. They won't stay in your body forever.

Speaker 2 One of the big differences in terms of long-term exposure is just the durability of metallic poisons versus plant alkaloids.

Speaker 2 But the other part of that is that in general,

Speaker 2 and this was certainly true before we learned how to detect poisons in a corpse, metalloid poisons like arsenic and antimony are dangerous in ways

Speaker 2 that because they're actually a little more deceptive than some of the plant alkaloids. Most of the plant alkaloids I'm talking about will make you very sick very quickly.

Speaker 2 And they're often very bitter in taste. So when people talk about cyanide poisoning, one, they say, how do you disguise the taste?

Speaker 2 You know, I'm going to put it in very black coffee, say, or something that covers up the very bitter taste of the poison. Whereas with a metalloid poison like arsenic, you don't have to do that.

Speaker 2 It's tasteless. It's odorless.
No one ever says cyanide is odorless. We all have heard about, you know, the famous bitter almond scent of it.

Speaker 2 There's only a portion of the population who can actually actually smell that, which is kind of interesting.

Speaker 1 So, a heads up on how these work.

Speaker 1 A government website titled Chemical Terrorism Fact Sheet Blood Agents, Cyanides, Hydrogen Cyanide, and Cyanogen Chloride warns that cyanides have long been known as poisons.

Speaker 1 They inhibit aerobic respiration at the cellular level, so they prevent cells from using oxygen.

Speaker 1 And in the Poisoners' Handbook, Deborah assigns poisons their own chapters, and chapter three is devoted to cyanides.

Speaker 1 And she writes that cyanides possess a uniquely long dark history probably because they grow so bountifully around us they flavor the leaves of the yew tree the flowers of the cherry laurel the kernels of peach and apricot pits and the fat pale crunch of bitter almonds they ooze in secretions of arthropods like millipedes weave a toxic thread through cyanobacteria and live in plants threaded through forests and fields.

Speaker 1 Humans recognized early the murderous potential of cyanide-rich plants, she writes.

Speaker 1 Scholars have found references to death by peach in Egyptian hieroglyphs, leading them to believe that those long-ago dynasties carried out cyanide executions, perhaps by making a potion from poisonous fruit pits, she writes.

Speaker 1 Centuries later, cyanide became more readily available in large and lethal quantities. She notes that hydrogen cyanide was used in pesticides, explosives, engravings, tempering steel.

Speaker 1 It It was used as a disinfecting agent in creating dyes, in making nylon.

Speaker 1 And I found a passage from the 2020 textbook, Toxicology Cases for the Clinical and Forensic Laboratory, which said that hydrogen cyanide, the chemical formula is HCN, is also known as prussic acid.

Speaker 1 And it's a colorless, extremely poisonous, and flammable liquid. It boils slightly above room temperature, and HCN is off-gassed in fires containing silks and woods and nylon materials.

Speaker 1 And more deliberately and ghoulishly, cyanide was used in World War II as a weapon for mass genocide in concentration camps.

Speaker 1 It was also added to flavorade drink to kill over 900 people under the direction of Jim Jones in what became known as the Jonestown Massacre. And yeah, it was flavorade.
So you can drink a Kool-Aid.

Speaker 1 But if you do find yourself in a bind and you suspect that someone wants you dead, a 2007 paper titled, A Genetic Basis for Hypersensitivity to Sweaty Odors in Humans delivers the bad news that, yeah, one in 10 people reportedly can't smell hydrogen cyanide, the poisonous gas.

Speaker 1 But some studies I read estimate that figure could be as high as 60%.

Speaker 1 And I don't know why it's such a big range, but I imagine that very few volunteers respond to studies asking them to whiff lethal miasmas.

Speaker 1 I would also like to add that this last paper I read continued that an estimated one in 1,000 lucky souls can't smell butyl mercaptan, the rancid issue of skunks.

Speaker 1 So again, cyanide is a plant alkaloid. But getting back to the metal mayhem.

Speaker 2 So the metalloid poisons, when you go back and you look at the history of poison, are much more commonly used because they're just fabulous homicidal poisons, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you could say that.

Speaker 2 I'm saying it in the purest poison-loving sense. They were fabulous homicidal poisons.
They They were tasteless. They were odorless.

Speaker 2 You could, you know, dose someone gradually and mimic the symptoms of a natural illness.

Speaker 2 I'm working on a book now about female poisoners, and you got me in a day in which I'm following the story of an arsenic, 19th-century arsenic murderess, Mary Ann Cotton, who killed for almost two decades.

Speaker 2 No. Killed children and husbands and lovers.

Speaker 1 I know you'll like pardon. Marianne Cotton,

Speaker 1 boy, she killed a lot of her children, some of whom she just named after each other, and then also killed them. Bit of a monster.

Speaker 2 And if when you go back and you look at like the causes of death, it's like it's gastric fever and it's typhoid and it's, you know, a gastric upset or it's pneumonia because one of the things about a poison like arsenic is it's a broad-spectrum poison.

Speaker 2 Attacks at the cellular level. It disrupts cellular metabolism.

Speaker 2 And so a a lot of its symptoms, you'd get a sore throat, you'd have an upset stomach, you'd be nauseated, you'd have stomach cramps, were very familiar to doctors who were working with a whole plethora of infectious diseases, right?

Speaker 2 Whereas there was no disguising cyanide.

Speaker 1 What happens when you are poisoned with cyanide?

Speaker 2 So cyanide is a neurotoxic poison and it's slightly caustic. Sometimes people who swallow cyanide, you'll actually see almost a chemical burning in some of the tissues.

Speaker 2 You know, arsenic, well, you you could mimic an illness for a week or two if you wanted to. Cyanide at an acute dose can take you out in half an hour or so, right?

Speaker 2 And sometimes faster, depending on how high the dose is, people will go into convulsions. Sometimes they'll foam at the mouth.
It's neurotoxic, so they convulse.

Speaker 2 You know, it's zinging through the nerves in a wide body way. And this is a very painful, very fast, very painful death.

Speaker 1 So it's not inconspicuous.

Speaker 2 So it's not inconspicuous. Exactly.
I'm always kind of like, you're an amateur, right? You use cyanide.

Speaker 1 Oh, dear. Was arsenic just like the gold standard for hundreds of years?

Speaker 2 It was. And by the time we got to the 19th century, in Europe it was nicknamed the inheritance powder.
In France,

Speaker 2 poudre des secession, because

Speaker 1 I know

Speaker 2 it was so widely available. And that's the other thing I think that is so interesting about poisonous substances is that we tend to actually deliberately use them because they're handy.

Speaker 2 So during the 19th century, arsenic was in cosmetics. It could make your skin pale, that kind of pale Victorian complexion, right?

Speaker 2 You actually can find advertisements from the time that say harmless arsenic tablets.

Speaker 2 It just cracks me up. But it was used in medications.
Strychnoin was used as a nervous system pick-me-up, right? But going back to arsenic, arsenic was used in all kinds of things. It actually

Speaker 2 was used in making candles burn longer, right? And doctors in England actually used to refer to these as corpse candles because they would off-gas arsenic gas.

Speaker 2 It was made of beautiful green dye, and the arsenic-based green dyes were used in wallpaper. They were used to color candy, right? Cake decorations.

Speaker 1 So you have this

Speaker 2 weird kind of way that we deal. We know these things are poisonous, but they're also super handy.

Speaker 2 So we keep them into society until certainly in the case of arsenic, people started saying this is just too dangerous to be so readily accessible.

Speaker 2 And now if you wanted to be, you know, a Marianne Cotton and kill people with arsenic, it would be really impossible, right? It's such a limited substance.

Speaker 2 If you're lucky, you can get it in a laboratory, although most people don't use it, right? It is actually in one leukemia treatment.

Speaker 1 So yeah, this Victorian-era green was named Shields Green after its inventor.

Speaker 1 And according to one piece in the Paris Review titled Shields Green, the color of fake foliage and death, this arsenic-containing Shields green was a vegetal color, like fiddleheads and ivy vines.

Speaker 1 And for city dwellers, the allure of Shields Green was impossible to resist, even though the Victorians were well aware of the toxic effects of ingesting arsenic.

Speaker 1 But it represented the human willingness to kill ourselves to replicate nature rather than simply engaging with nature. But we wouldn't do this nowadays.
Just kidding.

Speaker 1 We talked about this in the environmental toxicology episode. We do do it.
We are doing it right now. Do you have any idea how many microplastics and PFAS are in my blood? Me neither.
Oh well.

Speaker 1 Now in another piece titled Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, How Victorians Used Common Poisons to Become Drop Dead Gorgeous by the Molly Brown Museum.

Speaker 1 You may remember Molly Brown as the 20th century socialite and shipwreck survivor, also known as Kathy Bates in Titanic.

Speaker 1 And that website learned me that in those days when people died of tuberculosis all too often, the look of the consumptive was very desirable.

Speaker 1 It reads, the woman with the watery eyes and pale skin, which of course was from the cadaver in the throes of death. How goth, and not that much worse than heroin chic of the grunge era.

Speaker 1 But it's not all dark paleness, though. There is indeed a leukemia chemotherapy that is arsenic based.

Speaker 1 It's called trisinox, and it kills both the cancer cells and some healthy ones, and it can cause what's called differentiation syndrome, which affects blood cells and it can be fatal if not treated and trisinox is typically paired with oral tretinoin and if that name seems familiar that's because tretinoin is retin-a which when you apply it topically makes your skin nice and smooth It's a better alternative than arsenic wafers.

Speaker 1 Were people dropping like flies when they were eating it on cakes and taking it for beauty treatments? Like, was it at concentrations where it would take years before it got you?

Speaker 2 That is such a smart question. So, you know, as I was saying, you could use arsenic in a kind of low-dose sense to mimic a chronic illness.

Speaker 2 So, if you had, you know, a little arsenic in your candy or cake decorations, depending on how much there was, you might feel a little queasy, but it wouldn't last, right?

Speaker 2 You might think, oh, I had too much cake, rather than, oh, that must have been the green leaves on the cake decorations, right? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 There was a really famous famous case in England in the 1860s. It's called the Bradford case, in which a confectioner accidentally mixed way too much arsenic into penny candy.

Speaker 2 And it was sold to kids all around this part of Northeast England. I think almost two dozen children died.

Speaker 1 And this was a tragic case of a candy-making apprentice going on an errand to get supplies. And the druggist he visited was under the weather in bed.

Speaker 1 So a new guy at the pharmacy literally scooped 12 pounds of the wrong ingredient from a barrel of arsenic powder to give to the candy apprentice who didn't know better and then the candy maker distributed it to a local vendor whose name was william hardiker but in true weird victorian era trivia william went by the name humbug billy and i thought he must have been kind of like a sour-faced candy seller but it turns out that the peppermint lozenges he sold were known as humbugs so he was humbug willy but each candy that he sold that day unwittingly contained double the lethal dose for an adult.

Speaker 1 And yeah, 20 people died. Humbug Billy also was sickened.
He remained partially paralyzed for life.

Speaker 2 So that actually

Speaker 2 was the inspiration for one of the first food safety laws in Britain that restricted what went into food and also

Speaker 2 made arsenic less easy to buy it at a pharmacist or chemist because people were starting to get how dangerous it was.

Speaker 2 But in general, you know, you actually didn't, for the most part, think, oh, it was that cupcake. You just didn't feel that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You're like, oh, my blood sugar.
I got to be lactose intolerant. Meanwhile, you're

Speaker 1 gulping down arsenic.

Speaker 2 Whereas if it was cyanide, you would be like, I'm in big trouble right this minute, right? Very different. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've heard you say before that arsenic is your favorite poison.

Speaker 2 It is. Is that true? It's totally my favorite poison.
And

Speaker 2 even though it's hard to get, right? And that's partly because,

Speaker 2 you know, it really is a great homicidal poison. It was the first poison we were able to find in a human body.
And that was because everyone got that it was so widely used.

Speaker 2 And you really had this concerted effort by chemists in the 19th century to try to figure out a way to catch it in a body so that some of these people could be prosecuted, right?

Speaker 2 And that happened about 1840. But the other thing to me that makes arsenic so interesting is that it's a naturally occurring element, right? It's a metalloid poison.

Speaker 2 It's the 33rd most common element in the Earth's crust. And so it's also a fascinating environmental contaminant.
But arsenic in the Earth's crust gets into groundwater.

Speaker 2 And they've discovered from the fact that it gets into groundwater wells that are dug in arsenic rich areas for instance that at very low levels it's also poisonous but in a very different way so arsenic disrupts your cellular metabolism and takes you out but at the part per billion level it's actually corrosive to your cardiovascular cells it corrodes blood cells well that can't be good there was a

Speaker 2 point in the 20th century in which they discovered they had part per million levels of arsenic and groundwater in Taiwan, and people started developing gangrene in their feet.

Speaker 2 And it was strictly related to the destruction of blood vessels related to the arsenic in the water.

Speaker 1 And that was at parts per million in water wells. And according to the 2025 study, arsenic toxicity exacerbates China's groundwater and health crisis.

Speaker 1 Arsenic enrichment in groundwater is almost unavoidable because of the natural arsenic containing properties of rocks and sediments.

Speaker 1 But scientists are identifying which regions have the highest concentrations to try to mediate exposure down from the parts per million, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it ain't good.

Speaker 2 And that's why the U.S. drinking water standard for arsenic is 10 parts per billion.
Oh, wow. Really, really small.
Yeah. So it's like a beautiful example of a very multi-talented poison.

Speaker 2 And I say this in the most fair-minded way, right?

Speaker 2 Because it's not like I want to be in, you know, here drinking arsenic contaminated water I wish it wasn't so readily available in that sense but if you're going to look at a multifaccinated personality of a poison arsenic it's just incredibly interesting was arsenic the first poison that toxicologists started to get hip to where did they even start in the 1840s

Speaker 1 in detecting this in the blood? Did they have to like taste people's pee pee to find out if it was in there?

Speaker 1 You know how like diabetes doctors were like, you sip their pee and if it's sweet, they have diabetes. Do they have to feed it to a frog and see what happened?

Speaker 2 That diabetes example is such a good one. It's like, I have this moment of thinking, thank goodness I wasn't a doctor back then, right?

Speaker 2 So up until about the 1840s, everyone knew that arsenic was a well-used homicidal poison, right?

Speaker 2 The Borges actually were famous for supposedly developing a concentrated form of arsenic by poisoning hogs with it and collecting the drool of the dying animals in a way that the poison was concentrated.

Speaker 1 I thought maybe the Borges were some weird brothers. But according to the 2018 paper, Toxicology in the Borges Period, the mystery of the Cantarella poison.
Oh, it was a weird family.

Speaker 1 It was a noble family around the 1500s. They made a lot of popes.
They churned out three popes.

Speaker 1 They defrauded a bunch of people, and according to their publicist, Wikipedia, they were suspended of many crimes, including adultery, incest, theft, bribery, and murder, especially murder by arsenic poisoning.

Speaker 1 And it continues that because of their grasping for power, the Borgia family stands out in history as being infamously steeped in sin and immorality. So yeah.

Speaker 1 they were royal dicks, but not the only ones out there. But people could still get away with it if it weren't for those nosy 1800s pioneers of toxicology.

Speaker 2 So, you know, it was coming into the 19th century and going back quite a long way, a famous homicidal poison, right?

Speaker 2 And by the time we get to the 19th century, there are starting to be the first scientists who talk about forensic toxicology or detection of poisons. It's a brand new unknown field.

Speaker 2 It was really spearheaded by a Spanish chemist, Mateo of Orfila, who just started saying, We got to figure out how to detect some of these poisons, right?

Speaker 2 We're like letting murderers walk away right and left. I mean, he wrote the first book really looking at this and acknowledging that we didn't know how to catch an arsenic murderer.

Speaker 2 And so people started taking this on.

Speaker 2 And finally, there was a chemist, James Marsh, in England, who testified in the trial of an arsenic murderer who got away because they couldn't really detect the poison and who taunted him afterwards.

Speaker 2 You know, fooled you. Sucker.

Speaker 2 And Marsh was so angry, he just went into his lab and a kind of, I'm an hermit, don't bother me, I'm going to figure out how to detect arsenic and did come up with a test.

Speaker 2 It's called the Marsh test right about 1838, 1839. And it was a super primitive test.

Speaker 2 You're absolutely right that before then, it wasn't so much they would say, we know this is arsenic, but they might feed the, you know, victim's last meal or the contents of his stomach once they'd opened him up to a very unfortunate dog.

Speaker 2 And if the dog died, you could say, yes, this was definitely poison of some kind or the other. What Marsh did is he would take that same stomach and you'd sort of make a slurry of it.

Speaker 2 You'd add some different compounds to sort of separate out some of the materials, and then you'd get it super hot and create a vapor of the contents.

Speaker 2 And that vapor, if there was arsenic in the stomach, would then be cooled on a piece of glass. And if there was arsenic in the vapor, then it would form what's called an arsenic mirror on the glass.

Speaker 2 The arsenic would cool on the glass and it would form a shining black mirror.

Speaker 2 And so if you went through all the steps and you found this gleaming layer of reflective black material, you knew there was arsenic in the body. And that was the marsh test.

Speaker 1 What are you cooking?

Speaker 2 And at that point, people started using the marsh test in criminal trials.

Speaker 2 And what's really also interesting is they were then able to apply that to other, you know, metal-based poisons like antimony.

Speaker 1 Antimony, side note, is known by chemists as SB or 51, if you want to be numerical. And it's used in alloys for batteries and bullets, but also in fashion for coal eyeliner.

Speaker 1 And as per our collology episode on historical beauty standards, beauty is pain. And by that, I mean a slow death from metalloid poisonings.
You leave a gorgeous corpse, though.

Speaker 2 But they could do nothing about plant alkaloids. It was a very metal poison-specific test.
And we really didn't get to teasing out how to find plant alkaloids in the body until about the 1870s.

Speaker 2 And that was a case in which a French aristocrat murdered her brother with nicotine.

Speaker 2 She and her husband stewed tobacco leaves in a barn and mixed the resulting nicotine-rich poison into some of his food and killed him.

Speaker 2 Again, a very obsessive chemist, this time from Belgium, took that on and was able to detect nicotine in the body. And that was the beginning of opening up plant alkaloid detection.

Speaker 2 And this leads me to Poisoner's Hamba. We now have this deluge.
It's the industrial age, a deluge of industrial chemicals that no one knows anything about and can't figure out how to detect.

Speaker 2 And so Poisoner's Handbook really starts in the early 20th century in this period where no one is really sure how to detect anything well. And even the marsh test is kind of a shaky vehicle, right?

Speaker 2 How do we build the science of forensic toxicology and start catching killers?

Speaker 1 And so someone would go off and become obsessive and say, I'm going to to figure this out. With plant alkaloids, did they come up with a system for that?

Speaker 1 I mean, there's so many different plant alkaloids. And I imagine that arsenic, they must be like, shoot, we're busted.
And then we got to go to like foxglove or something.

Speaker 2 Most of the plant alkaloids are pretty visible deaths. Like strychnine is also neurotoxic and bitter and fast acting.
Aconitine, you know, is it found in plants like the monk's hood?

Speaker 2 You mentioned foxglove and that would be digitalis, which disrupts the rhythm of the heart.

Speaker 2 And so were they all identical in their action? They were not. Some of them were neurotoxic.
And so

Speaker 2 understanding cyanide would definitely help you start to figure out how to understand a neurotoxic alkaloid like strychnine.

Speaker 1 Strychnine, side note, comes from a genus of climbing plants called strychnose. And it was used for a long time as rat poison, which is not great for birds.

Speaker 1 For more on that, you can see next week's episode all about owls. We got owls coming up.

Speaker 2 I mean, one of the things that's really interesting to me about the work that was done in the Poisoner's Handbook. You know, you have these two scientists that I follow.

Speaker 2 They're underpaid civil servants in New York City in 1918,

Speaker 2 and they are dealing with all of the poisons of the 19th century.

Speaker 1 So Deborah's book, The Poisoner's Handbook, is this really beautiful portrait of the scientists behind the detection of these poisons.

Speaker 1 And Deborah writes, In 1918, New York City made a radical reform that would revolutionize the poison game and launch toxicology into front-page status.

Speaker 1 Propelled by a series of scandals involving corrupt coroners and unsolved murders, the city hired its first trained medical examiner, a charismatic pathologist by the name of Charles Norris.

Speaker 1 And once in office, Norris swiftly hired an exceptionally driven and talented chemist named Alexander Gettler and persuaded him to found and direct the city's first toxicology laboratory.

Speaker 1 Together, Norris and Gettler elevated forensic chemistry in this country to a formidable science.

Speaker 1 And trailblazing scientific detectives, she writes, they earned a respected place in the courtroom, crusaded against compounds dangerous to public health, and they stopped a great many jazz age prisoners in their tracks.

Speaker 1 I'm telling you, you'll love this book. You can buy it at the link in the show notes.

Speaker 2 So, some of the work that Alexander Gettler did in the 1920s and 30s on cyanide was groundbreaking work.

Speaker 2 But it really doesn't sort of build itself into a more sophisticated science until the 20th century. People were using arsenic well into the 1960s.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 So recognizing that, you know, the toxicology was there, but it wasn't fully developed.

Speaker 1 I also am curious about how modern toxicology reports work now that we can test for so many things and testing for synthetic opioids. And when is that a poison, and when is that an overdose?

Speaker 1 And you hear about people who maybe use antifreeze in a spouse's coffee. And we have so many more chemicals, so many more ways to kill each other.
How does modern toxicology even tackle that?

Speaker 2 Oh, that's a good question.

Speaker 2 We have the ability to detect many of these things. I mean, if you look at something like antifreeze, that's really a form of alcohol, diethylene glycol or ethylene glycol.

Speaker 2 And it's actually metabolized by the body and, you know, in a system very similar to how

Speaker 2 the body metabolizes wine or beer. So you can use the basic knowledge.

Speaker 2 In the early 20th century, people like Alexander Gettler really figured out some of the ways that we're able to measure methanol, which is wood alcohol or ethanol, you know, grain grain alcohol, and it's ilk in the body.

Speaker 2 The question about overdose is interesting, and I do want to shout out some work of Alexander Gettler in that regard. You've been drinking alcohol, but how do we know that you're actually drunk?

Speaker 2 And we know it crosses the blood-brain barrier, but do we know how much alcohol has to cross the blood-brain barrier before you get actual intoxication?

Speaker 2 And so one of my favorite things that Alexander Getler did is that during prohibition, when alcohol was prohibited, right?

Speaker 2 He actually looked at the brains of 8,000 people who had died of alcohol poisoning in some way and was able to work out how much alcohol was in their brain at time of death and what were their behaviors.

Speaker 2 right before death so that you could say, well, at this level of alcohol in the brain, you know, people are stumbling and people can't remember things and people lose coordination.

Speaker 2 And so he actually worked out the first first scale of intoxication. Oh, wow.
Which is, if you think about like, where did that knowledge come from?

Speaker 2 Someone has to start apparently by looking at 8,000 brains, right? That's so many. And we don't do that now.
Now we can take much smaller tissue samples.

Speaker 2 and we can run them through all kinds of different machines that measure, say, for instance, the chemical wavelengths.

Speaker 2 So if you put a compound or a mess of compounds into a gas chromatograph, you can measure like the wavelengths of the different compounds in that material, and that will tell you what's in it.

Speaker 2 And you don't need an entire brain to do it. Our ability now is that we can look for many, many things simultaneously and get results very quickly and get them at very low levels, right?

Speaker 2 That's a phenomenal move forward. The caveat to that is that

Speaker 2 one,

Speaker 2 you know, sometimes you also have to know what you're looking for. And so, as an example of that, there was a woman, she was a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Speaker 2 She was killed by her husband, who was another doctor at the University of Pittsburgh. He's in jail now.

Speaker 2 And he spiked this health drink she was taking as she was trying to get pregnant with cyanide.

Speaker 2 Oh, and he got caught in part because, in this hubris kind of way, he charged the cyanide on his department credit card. It's one of my favorite details.

Speaker 1 What a chibironi.

Speaker 2 But she went into the hospital. They couldn't figure out what was going on.
No one gets poisoned by cyanide anymore, right? This is in the 21st century. So they didn't test for cyanide, right?

Speaker 2 Why would they? You know, we just don't use it. It's not a common poison.
And the way they figured it out was there was a doctor. who noticed that her muscles were oxygen starved.

Speaker 2 She was in lactic acidosis, the same thing that makes your muscles hurt when you overexercise and your muscles get a little bit oxygen-starved.

Speaker 2 And he's like, Why is she in this particular condition when she's not running around? She's lying in a hospital bed. They had drawn some blood, so they ran the blood and it was packed with cyanide.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Did she, and she survived?

Speaker 2 No, she died.

Speaker 2 Oh, fuck.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. Her name was Dr.

Speaker 1 Autumn Klein, and she was a professor and researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who specialized in treating difficult neurological cases during pregnancy like epilepsy and stroke and migraines.

Speaker 1 She was 41 years old. She loved needlepoint.
Her favorite color was purple. She had a great laugh.

Speaker 1 And in an article in the journal Continuum, her colleagues wrote that she was in the middle of editing that issue when she was killed.

Speaker 1 But they said that we think Autumn would wish most to be remembered for her clinical work with patients.

Speaker 1 She gave patients time and she listened and she sought to help them understand their illnesses so they might become their own advocates. So we touch on this a lot in the victimology episode with Dr.

Speaker 1 Callie Rennison and in the genocidology episode with Dr.

Speaker 1 Dirk Moses, how victims of violent crime and homicide can be reduced to an object while their perpetrator is the subject and how the headlines of their deaths overshadow the entire story of their lives.

Speaker 1 So you may see Dr. Autumn Klein's story on TV and whose murder gets attention is another issue we discuss in the victimology episode.
But there are very non-fiction people behind those headlines.

Speaker 1 So let's lighten up a little bit and talk about fiction. Now, not just arsenic and old lace.
Which movies get it right and wrong? What books get it right and wrong? Does it absolutely drive you crazy?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 And I actually went on a public rant about one of the James Bond movies in which there was a villain and one of the things that drove him and he's chomped down on one of those spy cyanide pills and it destroyed his teeth.

Speaker 1 I had only one thing left: my cyanide capsule, my back left molar.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, it did not.

Speaker 2 I was literally yelling at the screen, right? Because, yes, as I said, cyanide is kind of acidic, and you can get like, you know, some marking of the tissues, but it's not that acidic. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's not even acidic enough to cause milk to curdle in a cup of coffee, right? I mean, it's a very mild acid. And so there's no way you would have destroyed his teeth.

Speaker 2 I just went, yeah, it was like I myself was a complete pain in the ass about this movie for quite some time because I was so annoyed about it.

Speaker 2 So the other thing that always annoys me about cyanide in films is like, you know, people take that cyanide-infused cups of coffee and they're dead in two seconds. Well, that's not true either, right?

Speaker 2 Cyanide kills you, but it doesn't kill you that fast. And so I'm always like, get a grip here.
At least get it right.

Speaker 2 So yes, I am exactly the person who my husband leaves the room if we're watching a movie that he goes poison.

Speaker 2 So I'm always like, no, no, it didn't happen that way. No.

Speaker 1 What about the song Poison by Bel Biv DeVoe? Do you remember that?

Speaker 2 That girl is poisoning. Oh, that girl is poisoned.
I love that song.

Speaker 2 I really do. Good.
Okay.

Speaker 1 I was just checking. That needs to be like your song if you ever come out for a boxing match.
That's what they got to blast.

Speaker 2 I would love that, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 I have questions from listeners. Can I ask them? Okay.
Okay, amazing. They had great questions.

Speaker 1 All right, but first we'll donate to a cause of Deborah's choice, and she opted to split her donation between World Central Kitchen and Earth Justice.

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Speaker 1 You may remember in April of 2024, seven World Central Kitchen aid workers were killed in a targeted bombing by the IDF while they were providing humanitarian aid to Palestinians facing famine due to aid blockades.

Speaker 1 So World Central Kitchen, thank you for all you do, WCK MVPs. And Earth Justice is the nation's leading environmental law organization.

Speaker 1 And for more than 50 years, Earth Justice has gone to court for clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment for all and represented clients free of charge.

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Speaker 1 Patrick Duffy, Curtis Dog, Teal, Misty Bence, E. Rennerby, Raymond, and Kaylee Vang wanted to know, in Kaylee's words, why is poison referred to as the women's weapon when it comes to murder?

Speaker 1 Where did that saying come from? But is it true that more women might kill with poison than men?

Speaker 2 So, and we've thought of poison as a woman's weapon, you know, for centuries.

Speaker 2 In the 19th century, when there were so many women who did poison people, it was about 10 times as often as men in the 19th century.

Speaker 2 That when Britain passed the Arsenic Act, there was a point where they were thinking they would just ban women from buying arsenic at all. Oh my God.
Oh, my God. I love that.

Speaker 2 That didn't, they had to take that out because there was such an outcry. But

Speaker 2 in general, and we see this in FBI statistics today, if you look at FBI statistics this century, women choose poison about seven times as often as men.

Speaker 2 They just prefer it's a preferred woman's weapon. But men actually end up numerically poisoning more people because men kill so many more people than women.

Speaker 2 If you look at those same FBI statistics in about the first couple decades of this century, they look at about 200,000 murders. Only about 20,000 of those are committed by women.

Speaker 1 10%, of course.

Speaker 2 In that kind of number, even if men are not poisoning as often, you're going to get more poison murders by men. So it's kind of this thing where we recognize that women choose poison more often.

Speaker 2 And so we think of poison as a woman's weapon, but it is also a male weapon, just not to the same degree. Men choose guns much more often than women.
So that's sort of the flip of that.

Speaker 2 And, you know, women choose poison for all kinds of reasons. It's clever.
It takes planning. It's less confrontational.

Speaker 2 You know, you're a planner and a plotter and you think it can get away with it, right? It appeals to people who like to plan.

Speaker 1 We're very good at it, and we're oftentimes saddled with, especially historically, obviously, caretaking, cooking.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how much your research in the new book is delving into this, but how much it might be a counterattack to violence that women are already suffering at the hands of, you know, spouses or intimate partners or whomever.

Speaker 1 Do you find that historically it's motivated by money or motivated by revenge or motivated by an effort to be safer?

Speaker 2 Right. In the 19th century and especially, it was a self-defensive move.

Speaker 2 And actually, there was a science historian from Caltech, Dan Kevlis, who wrote about this and he called Poison the Great Equalizer in the 19th century.

Speaker 2 Women had no power. If you were married, you couldn't own property.
You couldn't have a will. You couldn't get out of the marriage.
Divorce was not permitted, right?

Speaker 2 And so if you were stuck in an abusive situation, if you worked for a predatory employer, which people did, you had no way out, no way to defend yourself.

Speaker 2 And so, a lot of the poisonings we see, especially arising in the 19th century and going forward, certainly well into the 20th century.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to say even in the 21st century that we're looking at total perfect balance of power here, but women were really powerless.

Speaker 1 Hi, me here here in the U.S. It wasn't until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act that women could get a credit card or a mortgage without a male cosigner.
And that was in 1974.

Speaker 1 Literally put human beings on the moon before letting a woman buy a house. I want to scream until I die from it.

Speaker 2 And so they both worked in the home where they had access to all of these poisons, right? Arsenic, as I mentioned, was in all kinds of different things, cyanide and silver polish.

Speaker 2 Strychnine was a medication. Antimony was also used in cosmetics and other things.
So they had easy access, and this was the best way they had to defend themselves.

Speaker 2 I think that's one of the roots of what we see.

Speaker 2 Does that mean that all women who poison are merely trying to protect themselves? Most of the women that I'm writing about in my book are

Speaker 2 not exactly that. Most of the women in my book are serial killers.

Speaker 2 And you'll find with some of these women serial poisoners that they carefully take out life insurance policies on their intended victims before they kill their children and their husbands and their lovers.

Speaker 2 Right. So are women capable of being predatory, terrible people? Of course we are.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm wondering, several people, Kayla Lunar Crumpet, ASIC immunologists, Sarah Mance, Brenna Hull, Sabrina Motto, Mouse Paxton, and Patrick Duffy all wanted to know a few people in all caps about Aqua Tifana.

Speaker 1 And Kayla says, I've heard the recipe is lost, but how do we know it wasn't just another common poison given a fun name? What exactly was it?

Speaker 2 I mean, I actually have a whole section of my upcoming book on Aqua Tofana because it's so interesting.

Speaker 2 So if you go onto the internet and you Google the name Julia Tofana, you'll often see people saying that, you know, she's linked to 600 deaths. Oh.

Speaker 2 And so Julia Tofana is considered the name of the woman who sort of put the liquid aquatifana

Speaker 2 into

Speaker 2 homicidal circles in Renaissance Rome.

Speaker 2 And so the story is

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 she developed this particular compound. Again, it was sort of an enhanced arsenic compound, not unlike what we think of as the Borgia enhanced arsenic, which is called La Contorella.

Speaker 2 But Aquatifana was a liquid that was arsenic-based but improved on, right? So that it worked a little faster. And Julia Tofana is famous as sort of a killer for hire.

Speaker 2 She didn't kill 600 people, but she and a network of other women who worked with her. It's almost like a name for this network of female poison dispensers.

Speaker 2 Would put it into bottles that women could take home that looked very harmless. Some of them were actually in bottles suggesting that they were

Speaker 2 holy water

Speaker 2 kind of compounds that you would take home or blessed by the saints. I think some of them actually had labels that said they were blessed by the saints.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's dark.

Speaker 2 Yes. And it was at a time, going back to your point, that women were completely powerless.
So women would come for just the reasons we talked about earlier. They were in an abusive relationship.

Speaker 2 Their husband was regularly beating them up. Their employer was raping them.
They would come to the Julia Tafana network and they would get Aqua Tafana.

Speaker 2 And it acquired a really legendary status in Europe during that time period and even beyond.

Speaker 2 But it was so famous that when Mozart became sick, he actually wrote to a friend of his and said that he was positive he was had been poisoned by Aqua Tafana.

Speaker 2 That whole sort of legend that he was poisoned by another composer is based on the fact that he wrote that.

Speaker 1 Do you think it's true?

Speaker 2 I have no idea.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's some evidence that he was just really sick, you know, some kind of a respiratory infection. Like I said, this was in a time period when we couldn't detect poisons.

Speaker 2 And certainly arsenic-based poisons looked a lot like these naturally occurring illnesses. So he could have been.
We just can't prove it.

Speaker 1 So this rival was Antonio Salieri, another composer, and everyone was like. Antonio did it.

Speaker 1 But then others were like, okay, but if Mozart was deathly poisoned, why did he get better for a few months, keep writing music, including his own death requiem, and then he got more sick.

Speaker 1 Also, everyone knows Wolf King is a hypercontract. So even though Salieri is considered off the hook in terms of history, at the time, the rumors made him a pariah.

Speaker 1 He was canceled like it was Twitter in 2019. But you know who didn't lose status? Julia Aqua Tofano, the arsenic lady.

Speaker 2 She's a wonderful legend. And while I'm just talking about her for a minute, if you go back and you look at the way people see her, they see her as a hero.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 I mean, I've seen so many comments from people who are saying, well, you know, she stood up for women. Women were completely oppressed.
What else could they do? It's a really interesting perspective.

Speaker 1 Is there ever evidence of anyone who was enslaved or indigenous folks who fought back with maybe plant alkaloids that they had available?

Speaker 2 One of the things I looked at is the association between poison and witchcraft. Witches were seen as poisoners, witches were seen as evil, witches were seen as women.

Speaker 2 And I was trying to kind of pull apart, again, this is in the upcoming book, you know, untangle, why do we see witches as evil? Many of them were just healers. What was it going on?

Speaker 2 And when I got into that, one of the things I discovered was that certainly in the British colonies like Jamaica, say, that were, you know, built on a slave economy, or in the slave economies of the American South, now we're talking 17th and 18th centuries, there were real feelings that these slaves were brewing up these poisonous compounds as part of their religions, right?

Speaker 2 Their voodoo religions included poisoning their masters. And you actually find documents in which the slave owners are working to restrict access to plants, certain plants.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I actually saw it once in relation to Native Americans like the Cherokee, who were dangerous to settlers by virtue of the fact that they had access to plant poisons.

Speaker 2 But I find that poison, again, is self-defense and rebellion.

Speaker 2 It runs through our sort of history of the use of poison in a very consistent way.

Speaker 1 And thinking about how much Indigenous folks were separated from each other, from their language, from generational knowledge, you know, so much of that was kind of institutional in terms of trying to limit how they pass down any information and traditions.

Speaker 1 It's not surprising.

Speaker 1 But last listener question, so many people, Brenna Hall, Allison, Bellolin, Dana Ayers, Audrey Hudak, Andrew McKay, Felix LaSalle, Maddie Julian, Figment, they all want to know iocaine powder.

Speaker 1 Maddie says, I've heard you can build up a tolerance to poisons if you micro-dose them enough, like iocaine powder in the princess bride. So many people mention the princess bride.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you know the scene, right? Yes,

Speaker 1 of course. It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadly poisons.

Speaker 2 What's going on? And that's a great movie.

Speaker 1 It's so good. It's one of my favorites.
Iocaine, does it exist? Can you build up an immunity to it?

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 think it's a fabulous fictional poison. Right?

Speaker 2 Okay, they did a good job.

Speaker 2 But it's based actually on like an old mythology about arsenic.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 People used to believe that you could microdose yourself with arsenic. I completely recommend against that.
You just heard me talk about how bad it is, even at the parper buddy and level, right?

Speaker 2 But there was a real belief that you could take tiny doses of arsenic and it would build up an immunity to arsenic.

Speaker 2 And going even into the early 20th century, that was so widely accepted that one of the great detective novels of the golden age of detective fiction, Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayre.

Speaker 2 And if you haven't read it, spoiler alert,

Speaker 2 the whole solving of that crime is built on the belief that a murderer and his victim can eat the same arsenic-dosed meal, but one of them has built up a tolerance to arsenic. Oh, right.

Speaker 1 But truthfully,

Speaker 1 not a lot of truth in it.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, I think the only only thing chronic exposure to arsenic does is weaken your immune system and make you more prone to die, right? It's

Speaker 2 oh, no. It's not going to protect you.
There are chemical compounds that we, through repeated exposure, habituate to.

Speaker 2 If you continually take opioid narcotics, do you have to have higher and higher doses to feel the effect? That would be a sign of habituation. We know that's true with alcohol.

Speaker 2 We know that people who become alcoholics, their bodies, the enzymes that break down the alcohol, right, become more and more efficient in response to chronic dosing of alcohol.

Speaker 2 So they need more and more alcohol to feel the effect of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I've definitely found that after the holiday season, one glass of wine doesn't hit the same.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Your body is ramping up to deal with this, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't drink nearly as much as I used to.

Speaker 2 And so I, you know, I find to my annoyance, partly to my annoyance, that, you know, one glass of wine and I'm like, wow, one glass of wine, I'm really feeling it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So if you're like, weird, two glasses of wine does nothing. Well, you probably know this, but that means your body is like, oh shit, I have to deal with more of this.

Speaker 1 Come on, let's get this out of the body quick, quick, quick. Also, it is more expensive to drink when you need three to feel anything, in case you need a reason to cut back.

Speaker 1 Also, in terms of opiate overdoses, this is tragically true. And per the study, loss of tolerance and overdose mortality after inpatient opiate detoxification.

Speaker 1 So there's an increase in mortality among people who have detoxed from opiates, like released prisoners who were formerly addicted to opiates.

Speaker 1 And that's been attributed to the loss of tolerance and erroneous judgment of dose when they return to opiate use. So they might say, oh, well, this is how much I used to take.
I haven't cleaned.

Speaker 1 I'll take that again.

Speaker 1 And it continues that patients who successfully completed inpatient detoxification were more likely than other patients to have died within a year from an overdose related to a relapse.

Speaker 1 So, another good reason to keep harm reduction, like Narcan, in your first aid kit or your car. You never know who might need it.

Speaker 1 Also, as your internet dad here, another good reason to never try or ever go back because the world is unfortunately just full of ways to ruin your life. And I want you to have a good one.

Speaker 1 It's just a matter of time between some bro science is like, you got to get on this little bit of cyanide every day to get gains at the gym.

Speaker 2 Yeah, can you imagine? I mean, some of the health advice you hear this day, I just want to like go put my head down. What was it? It was elderberry, right?

Speaker 2 Like, there's certain formulations of elderberry that contain cyanide. Cyanide's a naturally occurring sugar in many plants, it's a glycocyanide.

Speaker 2 We find it in all kinds of peach bits and apple seeds and apricot pits and elderberry, right?

Speaker 2 And there was actually someone who bought into the elderberry is the ultimate health food and was taking it every day and developed some low-level cyanide poisoning as a result.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 And of course, per our foraging ecology episode and mycology episode, there are plenty of stories about mushroom poisonings, both incidental and accidental that can jack up your kidneys and liver and nervous system until you essentially become a post-alive person,

Speaker 1 which then becomes eaten by mushrooms. You've said that, like, poisoning is kind of the coldest premeditated,

Speaker 1 you have to be patient with it. You have to really know what you're doing.
It's not typically a crime of passion to poison someone with arsenic over a period of several weeks or more.

Speaker 2 No, there's no impulse to it, right? I lose my temper. There's a baseball bat standing by the door, whack, right? That's impulse, kind of a gross impulse, actually.

Speaker 2 actually but yeah um but uh i'm you know i'm really pissed off at you i'm gonna research the best possible poisonous delivery method oh my god let's hope no one's on chat gpt

Speaker 1 looking you know what i mean yes terrifying but what's the hardest part about researching these this do you ever get like stuck in a cul-de-sac of information or do you ever get bummed out reading about people who have lost their lives like what's the hardest part yes the aftermath of murder is almost sometimes I think even more traumatic than the murder.

Speaker 2 So, just to give you an example of that out of Poisoner's Handbook, there's an arsenic chapter there that starts with a,

Speaker 2 you know, aggrieved baker who is fired and he goes into the restaurant he had been fired from and mixes arsenic and all the bread dough that's proving overnight for the next day's lunch.

Speaker 2 It's a lunch counter in the 1920s. Over a dozen people died, but one of them was a 16-year-old girl who was working as a stenographer to go support her family.

Speaker 1 Her name was Lillian Katz.

Speaker 2 And I really focused on her story because there's this moment where her mother was talking to the newspaper and she was talking about the fact that she had wanted to make her daughter a box lunch, but her daughter had said, no, it was really hot.

Speaker 2 She'd just get, you know, a sandwich at the counter. And as a working mother myself, I just was caught in that moment where you're thinking, I failed to save my child's life.

Speaker 2 I should have pushed harder. I would do that to myself, right? I know.
And I could, you could just hear it in everything she was saying.

Speaker 2 And so I started with that particular example leading into the story of Arsener.

Speaker 2 And after the book came out, a man wrote me from Seattle and he said, you've solved a family mystery for me.

Speaker 2 And I knew my great aunt had died when she was really young, but no one would ever tell him why. Oh, wow.
And he had a picture of her, which he gave me, and a poetry book that she had had.

Speaker 2 And he said the only other thing he knew was that his grandparents had never gone to synagogue again. They would not accept a God that would kill their child.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I thought about that all these decades later, 100 years of family secrecy, because this was 100 years ago, and how much it had shaped that family.

Speaker 2 And I just really carried that with me as a reminder that murder casts a really long shadow.

Speaker 2 The people I write about, you know, they may indeed allow me to tell a story, but they're real people and they matter.

Speaker 2 And so I wrestle with that a lot, the awareness that I'm writing about the lives of real people. Some of that suffering, you know, continues for generations.

Speaker 2 And so I have to really allow myself to know that. And I think it makes me a better writer because I never think of anyone I'm writing about as just a narrative device.
I know they're real people.

Speaker 2 But I think when you write about bad things as often as I do, you also have to really compartmentalize it.

Speaker 2 It just really bothers me, right?

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 this is not the best side of who we are. But the other thing that I also hold on to is that you and I,

Speaker 2 we have access to, you know, poisonous things in our own medicine chests. Most people never poison anyone deliberately.

Speaker 2 You know, it's like we have the social comma pact as human beings that that's not acceptable behavior. And I think that's both the bright and the dark of this story.
There are people who do this.

Speaker 2 The most of us stand against it.

Speaker 1 What you mentioned, too, about connecting with that person who had lost his great aunt, you know, I imagine that's one of the most rewarding parts of this.

Speaker 1 Is there anything else that has really felt like it's stuck with you, either someone deciding to study chemistry or someone else deciding to, you know, become a writer or to look into something?

Speaker 2 Sure. I mean, I...
talk to it's been interesting to me since i started doing this i even occasionally will advise people who are writing murder mysteries, right?

Speaker 2 On, you know, well, if I wanted to use this poison, what, you know, is the best way to do it?

Speaker 2 One of the most interesting things that happened after that book came out, Allie, was that people started writing to me from all over the country about their suspicions that someone else in the family had killed someone they knew, a relative.

Speaker 2 I had actually a man who wrote me, he was convinced his sister-in-law had poisoned his brother to death. She had had the body cremated, as all good poisoners do, right?

Speaker 2 But he had rushed down to the mortuary

Speaker 2 at night before they actually fired up the furnace or whatever, and ripped hair out of his brother's head for testing. Wow.

Speaker 2 And so he had it in a box and he wrote me and he said, What do you think I should test for?

Speaker 2 And I'm like, I have no idea, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, in those kind kind of cases, I then go and look for good toxicology labs in your area, go down and talk to a local toxicologist, talk about the symptoms, right?

Speaker 2 So I found myself occasionally really trying to help people.

Speaker 2 I was talking about this social compact in which we don't poison, but at some level, there's nothing wrong with having your antenna out a little.

Speaker 2 And so that was really interesting and also kind of painful. You know, it's like one of those things where I'm like, I really want to help you.
Here is the absolute best I can do.

Speaker 1 Yeah. For now, though, people can find the Poisoner's Handbook and enjoy that.
It's such a great book. You're such an amazing writer.

Speaker 1 Thank you for doing what you do and being such an interesting dinner party guest

Speaker 1 at any dinner party you go to.

Speaker 2 You're a great one to have.

Speaker 1 This has been amazing.

Speaker 2 I enjoyed it a lot. And actually, a lot of people won't eat dinner with me at all.

Speaker 1 That girl's poison.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I surely should make that my same song.

Speaker 1 So ask benign people bedeviling questions because they usually have a pretty great story to tell if you ask. So thank you so much to Deborah Blum for being here and make sure to look into her work.

Speaker 1 It's linked in the show notes. Again, Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Poisoner's Handbook. Amazing book if you liked this episode.
Beautiful yarns spun in the name of history and science.

Speaker 1 So we'll also link her social media handles in the show notes as well as her charities of choice. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky.
I am at Allie Ward on both.

Speaker 1 Smologies are shorter, kid-friendly episodes linked to the show notes. Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com.

Speaker 1 You can support the show and send in your questions ahead of time via patreon.com slash ologies. Aaron Talbert admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group.

Speaker 1 Aveline Malik makes the professional transcripts. Kelly R.
Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our sweet scheduling producer.
Susan Hale is our very potent managing director.

Speaker 1 Our double dose of editors are Jake Chafee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn concocted the theme music.
And as your humbug host, I tell you a secret at the end.

Speaker 1 And if you have stuck around this week, it's twofold. Number one, I have not had a problem speaking into a microphone.

Speaker 1 this hard in a long time, but recording these asides, I had to do so many retakes. Like my mouth and my eyes were not connecting.

Speaker 1 So if I sound a little off in this one, my, I didn't sleep enough last night, but I'm not good at this today. You can't be good at it every day, but I'm glad you stuck around.

Speaker 1 Also, I can't remember if I told you this before, but I got a pedicure this weekend for the first time in like six months. Things were looking rough down there.

Speaker 1 And every time I get a pedicure, they're like, do you want me to bring out a chainsaw for this or a sandblaster? And I'm like,

Speaker 1 why do I have such rough feet? And part of it is because I have not been doing the thing that works so well.

Speaker 1 And if you have like elephant feet, but you're a human person, there's this stuff, it's called O'Keeffe's. I think it's called Healthy Feet.
I can't, I got to look it up. Yes, healthy feet.

Speaker 1 It's like in a turquoise little jar or tube. When I use it, it's like I have new feet.
This is not an ad. Healthy feet is not paying me any money.

Speaker 1 You put it on before bed and then you put socks on and you do that for like a couple of days in a row and you have like normal human feet.

Speaker 1 And then when you go to get a pedicure, you just try to touch something below your ankle. You're not like, why is this made out of rawhide?

Speaker 1 So, if you have ghastly feet that you could use to scare children on Halloween, get some healthy feet. I'll do the same.
Okay, I'm gonna go nap. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 Hacodermatology homiology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, global fabricology, mamphology, seriology, celerology.

Speaker 1 Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemies? Have you ever gotten something and been like, whoa, I never thought I would like this this much?

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