← Ologies with Alie Ward
Ologies with Alie Ward
Historical Toxicology (OLD TIMEY POISONS) with Deborah Blum
01:14:13
Metal poisons. Odorless ones. Toxic plants. Iocane powder, arsenic, old lace, poisons as self-defense, black mirrors, Aqua Tofanas, movie myths, and the start of testing for that which ails or kills you: we’ve got Historical Toxicology with Pulitzer Prize-winning science author & chemistry connoisseur Deborah Blum. She wrote the beloved “Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York” and takes us through a spooky walk in time, when chemistry was magic and homicide was an easier feat.
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- [00:00]
Allie Ward
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- [01:09]
Brenna Hull
I also love that they have things.
- [01:10]
Allie Ward
Like gut health and daily protein and I'm also trying to up my protein and it's great to do it on the go, especially with non dairy options. For me personally, not that you asked, but I'm telling you. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Get 25% off your first month only@ritual.com ologies you can start Ritual or add essential for women 18 + to your subscription today. That's Ritual for 25% off. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Oh hey, it's the moldy pumpkin you carved a little too early. Alie Ward. Let's enjoy some poisons. I love this guest. I first met her at a book reading over 10 years ago and I've always enjoyed so much her historical science writing. 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 off Pollston 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. And she also authored the recent Tactical Guide to Science Journalism and is writing a new book as we spoke. And how good is she? She's a Pulitzer Prize winner. She will tell us all about the history of toxicology and the poisons of then and now. But first, thank you to patrons of Ologies who support the show for a buck a month or more and to send in questions for the Ologist before we record. Thanks to everyone in ologiesmerch from ologiesmerch.com and if you need shorter classroom safe episodes of Ologies, we have smologies and their own podcast feed so you can look for S M O L O G I E s. It's called smallogies. And thank you as always to folks who support the show by leaving reviews which I I creep on, such as this recent one from Solar Bear whose review said, oh, Ologies never go away. The best little reliable landing spot for the weird wonders around the world. Solar Bear. I will do this until I fire myself. Okay, so toxicology, it means poison. 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. So toxins, toxic poisons. It's got some tree roots in there. 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.
- [04:12]
Deborah Blum
Deborah Blum, she her and you are.
- [04:15]
Brenna Hull
My favorite historian of toxicology. I love your book, your books in general. They're so beautifully written and they're such a vibe.
- [04:29]
Deborah Blum
I'll take that.
- [04:30]
Brenna Hull
There's nothing better than being a vibe. 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?
- [04:44]
Deborah Blum
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 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 world we haven't figured out. 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 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? They trick our bodies in all kinds of amazing ways. They're the most devious of all chemistry. And so the idea that you can match together both with 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.
- [05:50]
Brenna Hull
What was it about chemistry that you loved so much or that you love so much?
- [05:54]
Deborah Blum
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 klutz in the lab, I might yet be a chemist. But I was like a complete walking human mind in a laboratory. When I was in college, well, at the lesser end, I set my hair on fire. And it was a great moment because, I mean, it's the 1970s. I had those classic long braids that anyone who was anyone had in the 1970s. And I was sitting around working at a beaker, brewing up some poisonous brewer or the other, I suspect. 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? And if I looked down and my brains were in the Bunsen burner, right, I should have married that guy. Right? He was a perfect match for a human bottle rocket. But I also, in the same kind of airheaded way, generated a complete poisonous cloud. They had to evacuate the laboratory. And it was that second that made me realize that 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. I'm like, I'm not going to be a chemist, but I like to write. I guess I'll become a journalist. I loved journalism. I had been saying to my agent for years, I want to write this book because I really wanted to write about chemistry. And the other probably the thing in the mix is I'm the daughter of an entomologist who specialized in venom. So, oh, wow. 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. And so I grew up with this real fascination with poisonous things that I probably was also just probably part of my childhood. All of that came together for me when I started thinking, I really want to write about these uniquely fascinating compounds. And, you know, Poisoner's Handbook, which is the story of two underpaid civil scientists in New York, was the story that had completely disappeared. So the other pleasure of writing about chemistry is bringing people back to life. They disappear. You know, our history is littered with people who were high profile or stars of their field at the time that we've since forgotten. 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.
- [08:45]
Brenna Hull
Does it ever annoy you when people will use toxins and venoms or poison and venom interchangeably?
- [08:51]
Deborah Blum
Yes.
- [08:52]
Brenna Hull
Does that ever annoy you?
- [08:53]
Deborah Blum
Yeah, it does. So actually, the word toxic and the word poison are not interchangeable because toxins really refer to plant poisons or naturally occurring poisons that are not mineral poisons. Right. 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. 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. You know, then you're always guaranteed to be right.
- [09:37]
Brenna Hull
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. So I feel like that was drilled into me from entomologists and ecologists.
- [09:49]
Deborah Blum
But venoms actually are poisons. Right. I'm comfortable with using these terms somewhat interchangeably if I think they're correct.
- [09:57]
Allie Ward
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. 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.
- [10:16]
Deborah Blum
There is.
- [10:17]
Dr. Lauren Esposito
So no scorpions are poisonous because poison is something that's secreted. And then when something else eats that thing, it makes them ill. All scorpions are venomous, which is something that's secreted and then injected into the destined host like another animal. So there's a delivery apparatus for the venom. 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.
- [10:45]
Allie Ward
If you ate scorpion venom, would it be poisonous?
- [10:48]
Dr. Lauren Esposito
No, it's a protein, and your stomach acid would denature it.
- [10:51]
Allie Ward
So if you ate a scorpion, unless it stung you on the way down, you're good to go.
- [10:57]
Deborah Blum
You're good to go.
- [10:58]
Allie Ward
And then it would still be venomous.
- [10:59]
Brenna Hull
Because it wouldn't be digested.
- [11:02]
Allie Ward
So poison versus venom.
- [11:04]
Dr. Lauren Esposito
But I would, like, not recommend eating a thumbtack.
- [11:06]
Allie Ward
Okay.
- [11:07]
Dr. Lauren Esposito
So, like, in that sense, maybe not eat the stinger just because it's, like, sharp and I don't know what it's gonna do in your stomach. It seems, like, not a good. Like, not a good look for anyone.
- [11:16]
Allie Ward
Yeah. And also let them live.
- [11:18]
Brenna Hull
Let him live. Can I live?
- [11:20]
Allie Ward
Okay, so that was from scorpiology, but the same goes for spiders. We also have a pair of episodes on jellyfish. And jellyfish venom. 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, and the skull and crossbones as a death warning only goes back to, like, the 1850s. 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. And for more on that, we have a metric Metropolitan Tumology episode about catacombs. 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. And that's called aposematism. In Greek, it literally means away from me signal. But do you like Pirates of the Caribbean? 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. Aren't they all so named, Mr. Yuck. Studies showed that this mascot for poison was a really unappealing visual to kids. Seemed like a slam dunk.
- [13:08]
Deborah Blum
Mr. Yuck is mean. Mr. Yuck is free.
- [13:17]
Allie Ward
But some things, no matter how good an idea they are, just don't stay in fashion, like cargo pants and vaccines. 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. Yuk, Dr. Richard Moriarty, however, lived a long life. According to his 2023 obituary, he died peacefully at 83. He survived by his loving husband. And according to this one memorial article I read, released by the University of Pittsburgh, his alma mater and his hometown, his husband, David, kept his spirits up in his final days by putting Mr. Yuck stickers in some surprise 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. Moriarty's funeral, Pittsburgh skyline glowed in Mr. Yuk's signature verdant hue. So Mr. Yuk may have been his green, ghastly Frankenstein, but he was anything but.
- [14:19]
Brenna Hull
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?
- [14:32]
Deborah Blum
That's a really good question. So 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. Arsenic is, antimony is obviously lead. Copper can be poisonous. Silver has its poisonous qualities, even gold. 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? So, 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. But if you're exposed to a plant alkaloid, cyanide strip, they're volatile compounds, they won't stay in your body forever. One of the big differences in terms of long term exposure is just the durability of metallic poisons versus plant alkaloids. But the other part of that is that in general, 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 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, and they're often very bitter in taste. So when people talk about cyanide poisoning, one, they say, how do you disguise the taste? 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. 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. There's only a portion of the population who can actually smell that, which is kind of interesting.
- [16:31]
Allie Ward
So a heads up on how these work. 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. They inhibit aerobic respiration at the cellular level, so they prevent cells from using oxygen. And in the Poisoner's Handbook, Deborah assigns poisons their own chapters, and chapter three is devoted to cyanides. 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. Humans recognized early the murderous potential of cyanide rich plants, she writes. 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, 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. It was used as a disinfecting agent in creating dyes, in making nylon. 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, 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, and more deliberately and ghoulishly cyanide was used in World War II as a weapon for mass genocide in concentration camps. It was also added to Flavor Aid drink to kill over 900 people under the direction of Jim Jones in what became known as the Jonestown Massacre. And yeah, it was flavor aid. So you can drink the Kool Aid, 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, 1 in 10 people reportedly can't smell hydrogen cyanide, the poisonous gas. But some studies I read estimate that figure could be as high as 60%. 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. I would also like to add that this last paper I read continued that an estimated 1 in 1,000 lucky souls can't smell Butyl Mercaptan, the rancid issue of Skunks. So again, cyanide is a plant alkaloid. But getting back to the metal mayhem.
- [19:41]
Deborah Blum
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?
- [19:51]
Allie Ward
Yeah, you could say that.
- [19:53]
Deborah Blum
I'm saying it in the purest poison loving sense. They were fabulous homicidal poisons. They were tasteless, they were odorless. You could dose someone gradually and mimic the symptoms of a natural illness. 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, murderous Marianne Cotton, who killed for almost two decades. No, killed children and husbands and lovers.
- [20:24]
Allie Ward
I know you're like, pardon? Marianne Cotton, 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.
- [20:36]
Deborah Blum
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 attacks at the cellular level. It disrupts cellular metabolism. And so 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.
- [21:12]
Allie Ward
Right.
- [21:12]
Deborah Blum
Whereas there was no disguising cyanide.
- [21:15]
Brenna Hull
What happens when you are poisoned with cyanide?
- [21:17]
Deborah Blum
So cyanide's 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. You know arsenic, well, 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. 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. You know, it's zinging through the nerves in a wide body way. And this is a very painful, very fast, very painful death.
- [21:57]
Brenna Hull
So it's not inconspicuous.
- [21:59]
Deborah Blum
So it's not inconspicuous, exactly.
- [22:02]
Allie Ward
Yeah.
- [22:02]
Deborah Blum
I'm always kind of like, you're an amateur, you use cyanide. Oh dear.
- [22:09]
Brenna Hull
Was arsenic just like the gold standard for hundreds of years?
- [22:13]
Deborah Blum
It was. And by the time we got to the 19th century in Europe, it was nicknamed the inheritance powder. In France, poudre de succession because.
- [22:25]
Brenna Hull
Oh, harsh.
- [22:26]
Deborah Blum
I know. 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. So during the 19th century, arsenic was in cosmetics. It could make your skin pale, that kind of pale Victorian complexion. Right. You actually can find advertisements from the time that say harmless arsenic tablets. It always just cracks me up. But it was used in medications. Strychnine 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 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. It was made of beautiful green dye. The arsenic based green dyes were used in wallpaper. They were used to color candy. Right. Cake decorations. So you have this, this weird kind of way that we deal. We know these things are poisonous, but they're also super handy. 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. And now if you wanted to be, you know, a Mary Ann Cotton and kill people with arsenic, it would be really impossible. Right. It's such a limited substance. 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.
- [24:14]
Allie Ward
So, yeah, this Victorian era green was named Scheele's Green after its inventor. And according to one piece in the Paris Review titled Scheele's Green, the color of fake foliage and death, this arsenic containing Scheele's Green was a vegetal color like fiddleheads and ivy vines. And for city dwellers, the allure of Shiels green was impossible to resist, even though the Victorians were well aware of the toxic effects of ingesting arsenic. 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. We talked about this in the environmental toxicology episode. We do do it. We are doing it right now.
- [24:59]
Brenna Hull
Do you have any idea how many.
- [25:00]
Allie Ward
Microplastics and PFAS are in my blood? Me neither.
- [25:04]
Brenna Hull
Oh, well.
- [25:05]
Allie Ward
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, you may remember Molly Brown as the 20th century socialite and shipwreck survivor, also known as Kathy Bates in Titanic. 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. 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. But it's not all dark paleness, though. There is indeed a leukemia chemotherapy that is arsenic based. It's called Trisenox 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 Tricynax 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.
- [26:19]
Brenna Hull
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?
- [26:29]
Deborah Blum
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. 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. You might think, oh, I had too much cake, rather than, oh, that must have been the green leaves on the cake decorations, right?
- [26:56]
Brenna Hull
Yeah, exactly.
- [26:58]
Deborah Blum
There was a really famous case in England in the 1860s. It's called the Bradford case, in which a confectioner accidentally mixed way too much arsenic into it penny candy. And it was sold to kids all around this part of northeast England. I think almost two dozen children died.
- [27:18]
Allie Ward
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. 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. And. And yeah, 20 people died. Humbug Billy also was sickened. He remained partially paralyzed for life.
- [28:11]
Deborah Blum
So that actually was the inspiration for one of the first food safety laws in Britain that restricted what went into food and also made arsenic less easy to buy it at a pharmacist or chemist because people were starting to get how dangerous it was. 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.
- [28:39]
Brenna Hull
Yeah, you're like, oh, my blood sugar, I gotta be lactose intolerant. Meanwhile, you're just there you go gulping.
- [28:46]
Deborah Blum
Down arsenic, whereas if it was cyanide, you would be like, I'm in big trouble right this minute. Right. Very different.
- [28:53]
Brenna Hull
Yeah. I've heard you say before that arsenic is your favorite poison.
- [28:58]
Deborah Blum
It is that true? It's totally my favorite poison. And even though it's hard to get right, and that's partly because, 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. 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? 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. 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. 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.
- [30:19]
Allie Ward
That can't be good.
- [30:20]
Deborah Blum
There was a point in the 20th century in which they discovered they had part per million levels of arsenic in groundwater in Taiwan, and people started developing gangrene in their feet. And it was strictly related to the destruction of blood vessels related to the arsenic in the water.
- [30:40]
Allie Ward
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. Arsenic enrichment in groundwater is almost unavoidable because of the natural arsenic containing properties of rocks and sediments. 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.
- [31:09]
Deborah Blum
And that's why the US drinking water standard for arsenic is 10 parts per billion. Oh, wow. Really, really small.
- [31:16]
Brenna Hull
Yeah.
- [31:16]
Deborah Blum
So it's like a beautiful example of a very multi, and I say this in the most fair minded way, right, 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 multifaceted personality of a poison arsenic, it's just incredibly interesting.
- [31:44]
Brenna Hull
Was arsenic the first poison that, that toxicologists started to get hip to? Where did they even start in the 1840s in detecting this in the blood? Did they have to like taste people's pee to find out if it was in there? You know how like diabetes doctors were like, you sip their pee and if it's sweet, they have diabetes. Did they have to feed it to a frog and see what happened?
- [32:09]
Deborah Blum
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.
- [32:16]
Allie Ward
Right, I know.
- [32:17]
Deborah Blum
So up until about the 1840s, everyone knew that arsenic was a well used homicidal poison. Right. The Borgias 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.
- [32:40]
Allie Ward
I thought maybe the borsches were some weird brothers, but According to the 2018 paper, toxicology in the Borgias period, the Mystery of the Cantarella poison, oh, it was a weird family. It was a noble family. Around the 1500s, they made a lot of popes. They churned out three popes. 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. 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, 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.
- [33:31]
Deborah Blum
So, you know, it was coming into the 19th century and going back quite a long way. A famous homicidal poison. Right? And by the time we get to the 19th century, there are starting to be the first. There are scientists who talk about forensic toxicology or detection of poisons. It's a brand new unknown field. It was really spearheaded by a Spanish chemist, Matteo of Orfale, who just started saying, we got to figure out how to detect some of these poisons. Right? 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 detect to catch an arsenic murderer. And so people started taking this on. 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, you know, fooled you, sucker. And Marsh was so angry, he just went into his lab in a kind of I'm in hermit, don't bother me, I'm going to figure out how to detect Arsenal and did come up with a test. It's called the Marsh test. Right. About 1838, 1839. And it was a super primitive test. 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 victim's last meal or the contents of his stomach once they'd opened him up to a very unfortunate dog. 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. 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. 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. The arsenic would cool on the glass and it would form a shining black mirror. 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.
- [36:01]
Dr. Lauren Esposito
What are you cooking?
- [36:03]
Deborah Blum
And at that point, people started using the Marsh test in criminal trials. And what's really also interesting is they were then able to apply that to other, you know, metal based poisons like antimony.
- [36:17]
Allie Ward
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. And as per our colology episode on historical beauty standards, beauty is pain. By that I mean a slow death from metalloid poisonings. You'd leave a gorgeous corpse, though.
- [36:40]
Deborah Blum
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. And that was a case in which a French aristocrat murdered her brother with nicotine. She and her husband stewed up tobacco leaves in a barn and mixed the resulting nicotine rich poison into some of his food and killed him 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. And this leads me to poisoner's hamburger. 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. 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? How do we build the science of forensic toxicology and start Catching killers.
- [37:54]
Brenna Hull
And so someone would go off and become obsessive and say, I'm gonna figure this out. With plant alkaloids, did they come up with a system for that? I mean, there's so many different plant alkaloids, and I imagine that arsenic, they.
- [38:08]
Allie Ward
Must be like, shoot, we're busted.
- [38:09]
Brenna Hull
And then we gotta go to like, foxglove or something.
- [38:12]
Deborah Blum
Or most of the plant alkaloids are pretty visible deaths. Like strychnine is also neurotoxic and bitter and fast acting. Aconitine, you know, is found plants like the monk's hood. You mentioned foxglove. And that would be digitalis, which disrupts the rhythm of the heart. And so were they all identical in their action? They were not. Some of them were neurotoxic. And so understanding cyanide would definitely help you start to figure out how to understand a neurotoxic alkaloid like strychnine.
- [38:51]
Allie Ward
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. For more on that, you can see next week's episode, All About Owls. We got owls coming up.
- [39:04]
Deborah Blum
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. They're underpaid civil servants in New York City in 1918, and they are dealing with all of the poisons of the 19th century.
- [39:24]
Allie Ward
So Deborah's book, the Poisoner's Handbook, is this really beautiful portrait of the scientists behind the detection of these poisons. 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. 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. 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. Together, Norris and Gettler elevated forensic chemistry in this country to a formidable science 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. I'm telling you, you'll love this book. You can buy it at the link in the show notes.
- [40:23]
Deborah Blum
So some of the work that Alexander Getler did in the 1920s and 30s on cyanide was groundbreaking work, 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. Oh, wow. So recognizing that, you know, the toxicology was there, but it wasn't fully developed.
- [40:52]
Brenna Hull
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? 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?
- [41:21]
Deborah Blum
Oh, that's a good question. 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, and it's actually metabolized by the body and in a system very similar to how you. The body metabolizes wine or beer. So you can use the basic knowledge. 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 alcohol and its ilk in the body. The question about overdose is interesting, and I do want to shout out some work of Alexander Getler in that regard. You've been drinking alcohol, but how do we know that you're actually drunk? 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? And so one of my favorite things that Alexander Gettler did is that during prohibition, when alcohol was prohibited, right. 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 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. And so he actually worked out the first scale of intoxication. Oh, wow. Which is, if you think about, like, where did that knowledge come from? Someone has to start, apparently, by looking at 8,000 brains, right?
- [43:09]
Dr. Lauren Esposito
That's so many.
- [43:10]
Deborah Blum
And we don't do that now. Now we can take much smaller tissue samples, and we can run them through all kinds of different machines that measure, say, for instance, the Chemical wavelength. 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. 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. That's a phenomenal move forward. The caveat to that is that one, 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. She was killed by her husband, who was another doctor at the University of Pittsburgh. He's in jail now, and he spiked this health drink she was taking as she was trying to get pregnant with cyanide. 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.
- [44:33]
Brenna Hull
What a jabroni.
- [44:34]
Deborah Blum
But she went into the hospital. They couldn't figure out what's going on. No one gets poisoned by cyanide anymore, Right? This is in the 21st century, so they didn't test for cyanide. Right. 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. She was in lactic acidosis, the same thing that makes your muscles hurt, like when you over exercise and your muscles get a little bit oxygen starved. 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. Right.
- [45:18]
Brenna Hull
Oh, my God. Did she. And she survived?
- [45:21]
Deborah Blum
No, she died.
- [45:22]
Brenna Hull
Oh, fuck. Oh, man.
- [45:24]
Allie Ward
Her name was Dr. 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. She was 41 years old. She loved needlepoint. Her favorite color was purple. She had a great laugh. 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. But they said that we think Autumn would wish most to be remembered for her clinical work with patients. 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. Callie Renison, and in the genocidology episode with Dr. 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. 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 nonfiction people behind those headlines. So let's lighten up a little bit and talk about fiction, not just Arsenic and Old Lace.
- [46:37]
Brenna Hull
Which movies get it right? Wrong. What books get it right and wrong? Does it absolutely drive you crazy?
- [46:42]
Deborah Blum
Yes. 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. I had only one thing left, my cyanide capsule. My back left molar. And I'm like, it did not. 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, it's not even acidic enough to cause milk to curdle in a cup of coffee.
- [47:27]
Brenna Hull
Right.
- [47:27]
Deborah Blum
I mean, it's a very mild acid, and so there's no way it would have destroyed his teeth. I just went. 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. 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.
- [47:55]
Brenna Hull
Right.
- [47:55]
Deborah Blum
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. So, yes, I am exactly the person who my husband leaves the room if we're watching a movie that he calls poison. Because I'm always like, no, no, it didn't happen that way. No. Right.
- [48:15]
Brenna Hull
What about the song Poison by Belle Biv DeVoe? Do you remember that girl?
- [48:18]
Deborah Blum
Oh, that girl is poison. I love that song. I really do.
- [48:25]
Brenna Hull
Good. Okay, I was just checking. That needs to be like, your song. If you ever come out for a boxing match, that's what they gotta blast.
- [48:32]
Deborah Blum
I would love that. Right.
- [48:34]
Brenna Hull
So I have questions from listeners Can I ask them?
- [48:38]
Deborah Blum
Okay.
- [48:38]
Brenna Hull
Okay. Amazing. They had great questions.
- [48:41]
Allie Ward
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 Earthjust. And World Central Kitchen is first to the front lines providing fresh meals in response to humanitarian, climate and community crises. And their teams across the world remain deeply committed to serving delicious chef prepared meals to people with the dignity that they deserve. And they're doing incredible work all over the globe, including facing danger and death in Gaza. You may remember In April of 2024, 7 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. So World Central Kitchen, thank you for all you do. WCK MVPs and Earthjustice is the nation's leading environmental law organization. And for more than 50 years, Earthjustice has gone to court for clean air, clean water and a healthy environment for all and represented clients free of charge. So those donations were made possible by sponsors of the show.
- [49:44]
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- [50:14]
Deborah Blum
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- [50:42]
Allie Ward
Tap into the curiosity in your veins as we address questions from patrons of the show where you can join for as little as a buck a month. So let's hear em.
- [50:49]
Brenna Hull
Patrick Duffy, Curtis Dog Teal, Misty Bence, Erenerby Raymore 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? Where did that saying come from? But is it true that more women might kill with poison than men?
- [51:09]
Deborah Blum
So, and we've thought of poison as a woman's weapon, you know, for centuries in the 19th century, where there were so many women who did poison people, it was about 10 times as often as men in the 19th century 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, love that. That didn't. They had to take that out because there was such an out. But 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. 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.
- [51:59]
Allie Ward
Yeah.
- [52:00]
Deborah Blum
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. 10%, of course, in that kind of number, even if men are not poisoning as often, you're gonna get more poison murders by men. So it's kind of this thing where we recognize that women choose poison more often. 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. And you know, women choose poison for all kinds, kinds of reasons. It's clever, it takes planning, it's less confrontational. 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.
- [52:51]
Brenna Hull
We're very good at it and we're oftentimes saddled with, especially historically, obviously, caretaking, cooking. And I don't know how much your research in the new book is delving into this, but how much it might be a counter attack to violence that women are already suffering at the hands of, you know, spouses or intimate partners or whomever. Do you find that historically it's motivated by money or motivated by revenge or motivated by an effort to be safer?
- [53:22]
Deborah Blum
Right. In the 19th century, and especially it was a self defensive move. And actually there was a science historian from Caltech, Dan Kavlis, who wrote about this, and he called poison the great equalizer. In the 19th century, 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.
- [53:45]
Allie Ward
Right.
- [53:46]
Deborah Blum
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. And so a lot of the poisonings we see especially arising in the 19th century and going forward certainly well into the 20th century. 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.
- [54:17]
Allie Ward
Hi me. Here in the US it wasn't until the Equal Credit Opportunity act that women could get a credit card or a mortgage without a male co signer, and that was in 1974. Literally put human beings on the moon before letting a woman buy a house. I want to scream until I die from it.
- [54:33]
Deborah Blum
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. Pulmonary 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. I think that's one of the roots of what we see. 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 not exactly that. Most of the women in my book are serial killers. 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. Right. So are women capable of being predatory, terrible people? Of course we are.
- [55:29]
Brenna Hull
Yeah.
- [55:29]
Allie Ward
Yeah.
- [55:30]
Brenna Hull
Well, I'm wondering. Several people. Kayla Lunar Crumpet adds, the uriminologists Sarah Mance, Brenna Hull, Sabrina Model Mouse Paxton and Patrick Duffy all wanted to know a few people in All Cats about Aqua Tofana. 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?
- [55:53]
Deborah Blum
I mean, I actually have a whole section of my upcoming book on Acqua Tofana because it's so interesting. So if you go onto the Internet and you Google the name Julia Tofano, you'll often see people saying that, you know, she's linked to 600 deaths. And so Julia Tofana is considered the name of the woman who sort of put the liquid Aqua Tofana into homicidal circles in Renaissance Rome. And so the story is that she developed this particular compound. Again, it's sort of an enhanced arsenic compound, not unlike what we think of as the Borgia enhanced arsenic, which is called La Cantarella. But Acqua Tofana 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. 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 would put it into bottles that women could take home that looked very harmful. Some of them were actually in bottles suggesting that they were holy water 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.
- [57:27]
Brenna Hull
Oh, that's dark.
- [57:28]
Deborah Blum
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. Their husband was regularly beating them up, their employer was raping them. They would come to the Jul Tofona network and they would get acqua tofona. And it acquired a really legendary status in Europe during that time period and even beyond. 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 had been poisoned by Aqua Tofana. That whole sort of legend that he was poisoned by another composer is based on the fact that it's wrote that.
- [58:12]
Allie Ward
Do you think it's true?
- [58:13]
Deborah Blum
I have no idea. 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. And certainly arsenic based poisons looked a lot like these naturally occurring illnesses. So he could have been. We just can't prove it.
- [58:33]
Allie Ward
So this rival was Antonio Salieri, another composer, and everyone was like, Antonio did it. 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. Also, everyone knows Wolfgang 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. He was canceled like it was Twitter in 2019. But you know who didn't lose status? Julia Acquatifano, the Arsenic Lady.
- [59:09]
Deborah Blum
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.
- [59:17]
Brenna Hull
Really.
- [59:18]
Deborah Blum
I mean, I've seen so many comments from people who say, well, you know, she stood up for women. Women were completely oppressed. What else could they do? It's a really interesting perspective.
- [59:28]
Brenna Hull
Is there ever evidence of anyone who was enslaved or indigenous, Indigenous folks who fought back with maybe plant alkaloids that they had available?
- [59:39]
Deborah Blum
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. 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? When I got into that, one of the things that I discovered was that certainly in the British colonies, like Jamaica, say, that were 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. Their voodoo religions included poisoning their mouth. And you actually find documents in which the slave owners are working to restrict access to plants, certain plants. Oh, wow.
- [60:43]
Allie Ward
Yeah.
- [60:43]
Deborah Blum
And I actually saw it once in relation to Native Americans, like the Cherokee were dangerous to settlers by virtue of the fact that they had access to plant poisons. But I find that poison, again, is self defense and rebel. It runs through our sort of history of the use of poison in a very consistent way.
- [61:06]
Brenna Hull
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 passed down any information and traditions. It's not surprising, but. But last listener question.
- [61:29]
Allie Ward
So many people.
- [61:30]
Brenna Hull
Brennan Hall, Allison Bellollyn, Dana Ayers, Audrey Hudak, Andre McKay, Felix Laselle, Maddie, Julian Figment. They all want to know. Iocaine powder. Maddie says, I've heard you can build up a tolerance to poisons if you microdose them enough. Like icane powder in the Princess Bride. So many people mention the Princess Bride. I'm sure you know the scene, right? Yes, of course.
- [61:55]
Allie Ward
It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in.
- [61:58]
Deborah Blum
Liquid, and is among the more deadly poisons.
- [62:00]
Brenna Hull
What's going on?
- [62:01]
Deborah Blum
And that's a great movie.
- [62:02]
Brenna Hull
It's so good. It's one of my favorites. Iocane. Does it exist? Can you build up an immunity to it?
- [62:08]
Deborah Blum
I think it's a fabulous fictional poison. Right. Okay.
- [62:13]
Brenna Hull
They did a good job.
- [62:15]
Deborah Blum
But it's based actually on, like, an old mythology about arsenic.
- [62:20]
Brenna Hull
Oh.
- [62:21]
Deborah Blum
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 parp rebellion level.
- [62:32]
Allie Ward
Right.
- [62:32]
Deborah Blum
But there was a real belief that you could take tiny doses of arsenic and it would build up an immunity to arsenic. 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. And if you haven't read it, spoiler alert, 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.
- [63:11]
Brenna Hull
Oh, right. But truthfully, not a lot of truth in it.
- [63:16]
Allie Ward
No.
- [63:16]
Deborah Blum
I mean, I think the only thing chronic exposure to arsenic does is weaken your immune system and make you more prone to die. Right. It's. Oh, no, it's not going to protect you. There are chemical compounds that we, through repeated exposure, habituate to. 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. We know that people who become alcoholics, their bodies, bodies, the enzymes that break down the alcohol. Right. Become more and more efficient in response to chronic dosing of alcohol. So they need more and more alcohol to feel the effect of it.
- [64:01]
Brenna Hull
Yeah. I've definitely found that after the holiday season, one glass of wine doesn't hit the same.
- [64:07]
Deborah Blum
Exactly. Your body is ramping up to deal with this. Right. I don't drink nearly as much as I used to. And. And so I find to my annoyance, partly to my annoyance, that one glass of wine and I'm like, wow, one glass of wine, I'm really feeling it. Right?
- [64:25]
Allie Ward
Yeah, yeah. 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. 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. Also, in terms of opiate overdose, this is tragically true. And per the study, loss of tolerance and overdose mortality after inpatient opiate detoxification. So there's an increase in mortality among people who have detoxed from opiates, like released prisoners who were formerly addicted to opiates. 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. To take. I haven't cleaned. I'll take that again. 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. 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. 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.
- [65:42]
Brenna Hull
It's just a matter of time between some bro. Science is like, you gotta get on this little bit of cyanide every day to get gains at the gym. Yeah.
- [65:50]
Deborah Blum
Can you imagine? I mean, some of the health advice you hear this day, I just wanna, like, go put my head. Was it. It was elderberry, right? Like there's certain formulations of elderberry that contain cyanide. Cyanide's a naturally occurring in many plants. It's a glycocyanide. We find it in all kinds of peach pits and apple seeds and apricot pits and elderberry. Right. 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.
- [66:29]
Brenna Hull
Oh, no.
- [66:31]
Allie Ward
And of course, per our foraging ecology episode and mycology episode, there are. 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, which then becomes eaten by mushrooms.
- [66:52]
Brenna Hull
You've said that poisoning is kind of the coldest, premeditated.
- [66:58]
Allie Ward
You have to be patient with it.
- [67:00]
Brenna Hull
You have to really know what you're doing. It's not typically a crime of passion.
- [67:05]
Allie Ward
To poison someone with arsenic over a.
- [67:07]
Brenna Hull
Period of several weeks or months.
- [67:08]
Deborah Blum
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. But yeah, but I'm, you know, I'm really pissed off at you. I'm going to research the best possible poisonous delivery method.
- [67:26]
Brenna Hull
Oh, my God. Let's hope no one's on ChatGPT. You know what I mean?
- [67:32]
Deborah Blum
Yes.
- [67:32]
Brenna Hull
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?
- [67:47]
Deborah Blum
Yes. The aftermath of murder is almost sometimes, I think, even more traumatic than the murder. So just to give you an example of that, out of Poisoner's Handbook, there's an arsenic chapter there that starts with a, 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. 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.
- [68:26]
Allie Ward
Her name was Lillian Goetz.
- [68:28]
Deborah Blum
And I really focused on her story because there's this moment where her mother is talking to the newspaper and she was talking about the fact that she wanted to make her daughter a box lunch, but her daughter had said no, it was really hot. 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 think, I failed to save my child's life. I should have pushed harder. I would do that to myself. Right, I know. And you could just hear it in everything she would say. And so I started with that particular example leading into the story of Arsene. And after the book came out, a man wrote me from Seattle and he said, you've solved a family mystery for me. And I knew my great aunt had died when, and she was really young, but no one would ever tell him why.
- [69:22]
Brenna Hull
Oh, wow.
- [69:23]
Deborah Blum
And he had a picture of her, which he gave me, and a poetry book that she had had. 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.
- [69:40]
Allie Ward
Right.
- [69:41]
Deborah Blum
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. And I just really carried that with me as a reminder that murder casts a really long shadow. The people I write about, they may indeed allow me to tell a story, but they're real people and they matter. And so I wrestle with that a lot. The awareness that I'm writing about the lives of real people, some of that suffering continues for generations. 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, but I think when you write about bad things as Often as I do, you also have to really compartmentalize. It just really bothers me. Right. Because this is not the best side of who we are. But the other thing that I also hold onto is that you and I, we have access to, you know, poisonous things in our own medicine chest. Most people never poison anyone deliberately. You know, it's like we have the social karma 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. The most of us stand against it.
- [71:20]
Brenna Hull
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. 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. To become a writer or to look into something.
- [71:40]
Deborah Blum
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 on, you know, well, if I wanted to use this poison, what you know, is the best way to do it. 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. 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. But he had rushed down to the mortuary at night before they actually fired up the furnace or whatever and ripped hair out of his brother's head for testing.
- [72:34]
Allie Ward
Wow.
- [72:35]
Deborah Blum
And so he had it in a box and he wrote me and he said, what do you I should test for? And I'm like, I have no idea. Right. You know, in those 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. So I found myself occasionally really trying to help people. I was talking about this social compact in which we. They don't poison. But at some level, there's nothing wrong with having your antenna out a little. 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.
- [73:23]
Brenna Hull
Yeah. For now, though, people can find the Poisoners Handbook and enjoy that. It's such a great book. You're such an amazing writer. Thank you for doing what you do and being such an interesting dinner person guest at any dinner party you go to. You're a great one to have. This has been amazing.
- [73:41]
Deborah Blum
I enjoyed it a lot and actually a lot of people won't eat dinner with me at all.
- [73:44]
Dr. Lauren Esposito
So.
- [73:47]
Brenna Hull
That girl's poison.
- [73:49]
Deborah Blum
Yes, exactly. I should really should make that my theme song.
- [73:58]
Allie Ward
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. 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. So we'll also link her social media handles in the show notes as well as her charities of choice. We are Ologies on Instagram and bluesky. I am at Aliework on both. Smallogies are shorter kid friendly episodes linked in the show notes. Ologies Merch is available@ologiesmerch.com you can support the show and send in your questions ahead of time via patreon.com Ologies Erin Talbert admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes the professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our suite scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our very potent managing director. Our double dose of editors are Jake Chaffee 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. And if you have stuck around this week, it's twofold. Number one, I have not had a problem speaking into a microphone 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. 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. 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 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, why do I have such rough feet? And part of it is because I have not been doing the thing that works so well. 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 gotta look it up. Yes, Healthy Feet. 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. You put it on before bed and then you put socks on. And you do that for like a couple days then and in the row and you have like normal human feet. 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? 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 going to go nap. Bye. Bye.
- [76:32]
Brenna Hull
Pachydermatology, homeology, Cryptozoology, Lithology, technology, Meteorology, Coal factology, pathology, serology.
- [76:51]
Deborah Blum
Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet? Or his enemies?
- [76:56]
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- [77:26]
Allie Ward
Have you ever gotten something and been like, whoa, I never thought I would like this this much. Okay, here's one of the those things. I got a mill food recycler. It's great. One thing we can do to have an impact on the planet is we can keep food out of the trash. This is why I love having a mill. It takes almost anything. You got food scraps, you have chicken bones, you have stuff that would normally be stinky in your trash and instead you put it in the mill. Looks kind of like a laundry hamper. As you sleep, it transforms your food scraps into these nutrient rich grounds for the garden. Garden. You can put it in the compost or mill can get them to a farm for you. You can fill it for weeks. It never smells. It is the easiest way to cut down on food waste at home. It is not messy. It is not stressy. A mill food recycler is something that makes those days when you're cleaning out the fridge so much less stressful, and it really takes the rot out of food waste. Our kitchen smells and feels cleaner, and it makes it easy to do something good for the planet and keep food waste out of landfills. So if you're like, get me one of them, I'll help you out. You can get $75 off with the code ALLY a l I e@mill.com OLOGIES it's code ALLY mill.com OLOGIES I love ours.