Primrose Kitten

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

Have you ever thought about how easy poison kills people? How anyone can poison someone else and it would considerably harder to catch that person than finding someone who shoots somebody?

Well, the thing is, poison and death by poisons were something extremely common back in the day, in the old New York City. People were mostly killed by poison, and it was almost impossible to track down who did it… And soon enough, America had a problem, a poison problem.

This book centres around that premise, the fact that back in the day, this particular situation was happening over and over, and how that set the beginning of forensic medicine.

In The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, we are introduced to what it might seem like a fiction book, and it might be at quite some times. Still, it is one of the most exciting and well-put-together books about this particular part of science.

You see, throughout the book, we meet we the two main protagonists, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, one is a chief medical examiner and the other a toxicologist, and we began to explore the extreme cases that are happening in the busy city of New York.

The book is divided into chapters, each talking about a different murder case, and you guess it, each murder is from poisoning. In each chapter, we begin to understand more about how poisoning became so popular in America, how it worked, and the efforts made to control the whole situation.

Although the book is fascinating just by talking about that one subject alone, it doesn’t stop there. The book shines a light on how all of these cases help to build what is now known as forensic medicine.

Seeing how the society and science itself changed to try to solve a very deadly problem that was destroying New York City, is utterly fascinating. They were able to control the use of poison and be able to track down and catch people who used them for said purposes. It was hard, but the process was completely worth it.

If you are in for a good read full of mystery, suspense and a lot of actual scientific information about the poisons and forensic medicine, all wrapped up in several different cases that will catch your attention from moment one, well this is the book for you!