"The Poisoner's Handbook" with Author Deborah Blum Pt. 1

science journalist. She is the author of six books. She is also now the director of the night Science Journalism program at M I T. And we worship her. So we have light resume there, nothing to check the box at the watch. But we have her here with us today because she is the author of the New York Times notable book Poison Squad and the New York Times bestseller The Poisoner's Handbook. Deborah, welcome. Do you want to

add anything to let us know who you are? Our poison expert extraordinaire here, Like, just overwhelmed by how nice you guys are. Really a pleasure to be here, and you know you're cover so many of my favorite subjects. It's actually fun for me not to be talking about how to run a remote fellowship program in the time of and I imagine so talking about how to kill

people and other things that are more interested about arsenic symptoms. Listen, Love, We're gonna talk to you about some arsenic You are, of course, very well known as a journalist, and your love of science has driven so much of your work. Will you talk about how you ended up writing about science, science, history, and specifically poison, George, that's great territory for me to

cover and and you know, just stopped me. I grew up in the South and Louisiana and Georgia, so I'm perfectly capable of going on about this stuff, you know, for the until the end of time. So if I do this. So I'm a failed chemistry major. My dad was an entomologist and chemical ecologist at the University of Georgia. And I and I when I started college, I wanted

to be a chemist. And I discovered the some of the things that make me a good journalist, you know, having a short attentions man, uh, not working at all in the laboratory. And and I was actually a danger to myself and others. I set my hair on fire in one memorable afternoon, and also at one point generated speaking of a poison, a toxic cloud that caused them to have to evacuate the freshman chemistry lab. Your very first,

very early age, right. So, but you know, so I went into ournalism because for the same reason that I like chemistry, I like to know how things work. And then eventually realized, after several years of working for newspapers that I really wanted to combine both of those loves, my interest knowing how things work scientifically my interest in

knowing how things work in society. Got a grad degree in science journalism with a specialty and environmental toxicology, and went off to be a science writer in California, which was where I won the bullets er. Although that was writing about primate research, right, um, but that launched me into writing books, and I continued to write books. I kept saying to my agent, I've had the same edge and ever since I started writing books, and she's wonderful.

I kept saying, you know, I'd really like to write a book in which poisons are characters, because partly because I was grounded in chemistry, and partly because I like murder. I grew up with Agatha Christie and a lot of early murder mystery writer is Agatha Christian in particular, who really did a lot of work with poisons um because she had worked in a hospital dispensary in World War One.

UM And and she kept saying, oh, no, Devra, I have a better idea, no deveror you could do this, and finally, or books, and She's like, I can't take it anymore. It's like the slow drip of torture. Let's let you write the book that you wanted, right and so and she said, um, just right, and and this I have had the same editor for the last three books. She said, don't write a proposal, just write a delicious

little two page letter to your editor. And I thought that would be so interesting to sell a book writing two pages. So I wrote a proposal on the idea that I was not going to kill my husband but I could, and a lot of stuff that I knew about poisons at the time. And my editor at Penguin Press bought the book. And then this is my advice to everyone who listens to this focus. Don't be me and don't do this, because then I sold the book. I immediately spent the advance and and I'm like, well,

what's this book really about. I can't write a book about how to poison my husband. That wouldn't be good. And so I then went into this frantic research that led me to find the two scientists who are at the heart of Poisoner's Handbook, which does indeed do what I had originally thought about, which was both tell their story but also look at poisons as the fascinating characters and the personalities that I think they have, which is

a very science journalist way of seeing things. I love writing about science, and I love writing about chemistry, and I actually like writing about really dangerous substances because I think and that we need the too us to navy get a chemical world. We live in a chemical world. I am a collection of chemicals myself. I'm inhaling them as we speak, as are all of us. Most of them are not dangerous, but most people don't have the kind of toolkit to say what should it be I'd

be afraid of? And how do I protect myself? And what should I not? And so a lot of what I think science journalists like myself do. All I hope we do is to provide people who are not, you know, right at the science inner circle, or don't follow it regularly, some of the tools that just let them navigate in an intelligent way because they are smart, they just need

the tools. And that's really underlies my love of science journalism and is probably one of the reasons I'm here at in I t So that's my long Southern answer. I love it as I thought it would be. Um So, one of the hurdles that we often have when we're preparing our episodes is sometimes the sparse sinus of historical records just there's nothing out there, or if it is out there, there might be two or three sources and they all conflict with each other. Um. I imagine that

you have come across the same challenge. And um I was wondering if you could talk a little bit over the years of writing about science history, how he worked around that kind of challenge. Oh, I'm gonna love answering this. Um Uh, you know, well, real the inner nerd that I am, I guess um And and that reminds me. You know, I've done four books now that are narrative histories of science too about toxicology. But I love writing

about history of science history in general. But because I don't think you really understand where you are unless you know how you got there, and that would be and and that's another part of you know, how did I

get here? It's certainly true one of the lessons for me, especially in the Poison Squad book, which is about the invention of food safety in the United States, and that history both explain how we came up with the idea that, you know, we should regulate for food safety, but also why we do it so badly on a number of levels even today. So having said that, you know, it's

a real challenge depending on what you're writing about. When I did Poison Squad, the minor recent book, Harvey Washington Wiley, who was the chemist at the heart of that story, had been married to a suffragette librarian. I just love that, and she had left all of his papers to the

Library of Congress. So the in that case, because I like to work from original documents, um, it was a matter of did I have enough time to go through four hundred linear feet of Harvey Washington wilt papers and documents and newspaper clippings and memos and letters and trying to figure out how to be smart that I mean, you don't always infect you must never get that right.

But in that particular, as I was a wash in a see of documents which was super helpful, um and also daunting Poisoner's Handbook, I think better gets at that the some of the challenges that you mentioned. So as I said, I, UM, when I finally, after some fairly hysterical months of research, discovered in the in the newsletters of the Society Forensic Toxicology that the toxicologists at the heart of that book, Alexander Getler is considered the father

of American forensic toxicology. UM, I thought, oh, this is great. I'll just go find a biography of him, and there was none. And then I went and looked for a biography of his boss, Charles Norris, who was the you know, wonderful and pioneering first uh medical examiner in New York City, and there was none. Right, And so I'm like trolley around trying to find information about these eyes, which was the other challenge. And so after much going through and

then some of it you can be smart about. You can go onto you know, and look at what were the contemporary toxicology books, the books about legal medicine published in the early twentieth century. And I bought a lot of those, um from used booksellers, and I have some of them to this day. UM. But and then you can look at contemporary journals. I did that too, So I can go into the Journal of the American Medical Association or Science of the Journal of Toxicology and look

for papers published by Alexander Getler. And that was really essential for me in trying to both understand or look for papers about arsenic what did we know about arsenic and nine? Right, So all of that kind of helps provide a foundation. But then you start kind of saying, well,

are there other archives that have some materials? So in this case, and this is one of my favorite stories about the challenges of working with archives and very different from the Library of Congress, I discovered that the New York City Municipal Archives had actually archived the letters of the Medical Examiner's Office from nineteen eighteen to nineteen thirty five, just the period with Norris though. Oh, this is fantastic, and I talked on the phone to an archive is

an extremely hostile and unfriendly archivist at the municipal archive. UM. But and I and it was so I'm like, oh, I'm so excited about this and I can't wait. I'm gonna come to New York. Let me take you out to dinner when I get there to thank you for your help. And he's like, we do not have to meet in person, and so I know. But I go to this archive, which is in an old it's like one of the old city halls of New York and um, and it's you know, underfunded and unfriendly um as anyone

will tell you. And so I go up all shiny and like I have we already look at these papers and literally the guy the counter says to me, we don't have those and I go, yes, you do. It was just like being in kindergarten. He goes, no, we don't. I go, yes, you do. He goes, no, we don't come all the way to New York, right. UM. I said, yes, you do it. In fact, here's the name of the archivist who won't speak to me, um, and here's his

phone number, and you're welcome to contact him. And so the guy goes off and he talks I never did see the archives. UM to the archives, and then he comes back and says, yes, we do actually have these, UM, and so here's the forms you have to fill out to get them. And I fell out the forms and these box has come up. They've got like a dumb waiter behind the counter and these it comes creaking up in a very atmospheric way with these boxes of files

that are covered with dust and apparently some mold. Because both my I had my one of my grand students helping me UM when I this was when I was at Wisconsin UH, and both of us were sick. But the with the rest of it because we could have out them in other ways UM. And those files were amazing and really an unknown resource. So even when they were working on the documentary failed a Porsoner's handbook, they went back they said they had arm wrestle them out

to write UM. So it wasn't like I had suddenly opened the floodgates. So once I had those, I you know, then looked at other you know, other archives, UM, and I went over to the New York City Public Library. I was doing a lot of contemporary you know what what what was being covered about Geller and Norris and Poisons at the time, and so I went to the New York City Public Library because you can get through ProQuest historical newspapers, the New York Times and a lot

of the big major dailies. But I wanted like the Brooklyn Eagle and on small papers, and they had those on microphis. So a lot of that was going in and finding the stories of micro phish, which I don't recommend, but we're and you know, printing them out. I did that, and then the one other thing, and then you know, we did interviews with um, you know, called people. There were still a few people left too, had been students

of Getler, the Getler boys and UM. One of the things I did when I was doing research, and this will tell you just how anal or researcher I am, is that I had discovered, uh been able to track down Alexander Getler's kids and and their kids. And I knew that his son Joseph had a number of grandid kids or his grandkids who still lived in the New York City area. UM, and I didn't have their exact look and I did, I had their birth records, but

not their exact location. So I went to a friend of mine who worked for a newspaper who had some of those super search tools, and I said, if I give you this person's name and their date of birth and where they were born, can you find out for me where they're living now. And she did, and she said, you know, and don't tell anyone I did this. And also I'm not giving you his social Security number. Please don't give me his social Security number. Um. But basically

I had the name. It was Paul Getler, who was one of Alexander Getler's grandkids. So I used my pages and I called every single Paul Getler in that county and I just said, Hi, my name is Debord Woe. I'm looking for the grandson of Alexander Getler for a book I'm working on. And eventually got him, and he was fantastic, and he put me in touch with some of his siblings, one of whom had had her daughter.

So Getler's great granddaughter had done a high school history report on him, and they came to my hotel in New York with her entire presentation and set up the giant poster boards in the lobby of the hotel too, I think slightly the horror people at the front desk of the hotel. But they had like letters and journals

and all kinds of stuff that they lent me. And when I went on book tour and I went back to New York to talk about the book at a Barnes and Noble in New York City, Um, the whole Getler family was there, filling up the first two rows of that, you know. Um. And so that was wonderful, And that was another way that I was able to get at resources that weren't obvious. I think people who read these histories, you know, to me, they're a giant mosaic.

And because I'm a narrative writer, I'm also looking for the pieces that I can put people in the time. You know, what did the city look like? What did the city sound like? All of those things, Um, But you're building this kind of tapestry or mosaic, uh and out all of these different pistes matter, and it is

a ton of word. We have, as you know, talked a lot about women poisoners this season, and I know you have some thoughts on women and poison and why poison is considered a women's weapon and why that's not really an accurate characterization, Will you just share your thoughts on that matter with us? Sure? And in fact, while I was a blogger at Wired after I did Poisonous Sound Book, it's been about a decade. I still do to some extent, you know, researching and writing about poisons things.

I had a blog at Wired called Elemental and a blog in the New York Times called poison pen Um, And at Wired I actually did a whole blog on the myths of the female poisoner, right, which I really enjoyed. So you know, if you go back even to like you know, early crime fiction, when you actually looked at the modern xt FBI statistics, you see that that's not true. I mean, it's kind of women use poison more preferentially

over other weapons like guns and knives. Right, But if you look at the whole panoradum of poisoners, there's more male poisoners than female poisoners. But part of that, again is that there's more homicidal males than homicidal females. Right, there's just more men who killed people, is I dis the entire um, And so there's a lot. So when you actually look at the numbers, just the great numbers there's more male poisoners in the United States than female poisoners.

If you analyze the use of weapons, you do see it tilts a little more female. And it's actually interesting because I did another book looking at biology and behavior, and one of the things that people talk about was that consistent imbalance on violence, right, and that there had been this idea, for instance, that as you know, guns became more available to women, there would be more shooting deaths caused by women than men, or it would equalize out,

but in fact it never did. Right. Women in general, when you look at crime statistics, um, just don't commit those kinds of crimes. And you could certainly make this

case I'm going on poison for a minute. If you look at the history of mass shootings in the United States, right, women have access to exactly the same women, but you don't see that pattern of mass shootings, right if there's just something socially, culturally, biologically, so something in the mix that So that's why you tend to see this sort of higher number of male poisoners, because you see a

higher number of male assaults and tempted deaths. But the myth of the female poisoner probably dates back to the nineteenth century UM in which poisons were highly accessible in a domestic way, right, and women actually more access to them often than men if you looked at it in that sense, because they were the caretakers of the home and the distribution of UH jobs in the nineteenth century,

and so um they had access for two pharmaceutical products. Right, Arsenic was quite common in UM different tonics and treatments to improve your complexion in Victorian times. Right. Fowler's solution is a famous example of that. You find these wonderful advertisements targeting women, you know, in which they talk about, you know, how arsenic is going to make you more beautiful, and also how arsenic is entirely safe, which everyone knew wasn't true, but you know, for some reason, they don't

always tell the truth in advertising. What I know him and have this incredible access to cosmetics right, containing one of the world's most famous and at that time handy homicidal poisons. I mean, arsen was a fabulous poison or poison in the nineteenth century because it's tasteless, it's odorless, it mimics the symptoms of a natural illness, and because they were just figuring out how to detect it in

a corpse. Right, so, um so, women have access to this in a way, and not that a man couldn't walk into a drug store and buy file Folwer solution, but you know it's widely available to women. And a lot of the home products there were cyanide and some of the compounds that they used to like polish medal in the house. You know, there was stryct nine and

pick me up tonics. Say mean, people had this incredible access to these in a way that triggered no alarm if you casually went and got something that contained arsenic or straight nine. Um so it was super easy if you were annoyed with your husband or your boyfriend or or was we're trying. Arsenic used to be known as the inheritance powder, you know, to work your way to your inheritance to just you know, put it in coffee

or something, and people did. There were some quite notable women mass poisoners in the nineteenth century like Maryanne Cotton right who did exactly what I said us. You know, handily available arsenic to work or to to get eliminate relatives that stood in the way of money, to eliminate partners so that you can inherit. I mean, I think two was in the neighborhood of close to twenty by the time they caught her, which will tell you. And so that those kinds of you know, really stand out.

Mass poisonings tended to shape the idea that women did this um in a way that is both you know, has a little bit of if I are in the smoke, but it's partly in largely smoke. We still have so much more from our great chat with blond and that is going to be next week's episode, which time thrilled about because this is easily one of my favorite conversations I have had all year. That's not even qualified as in a podcast, etcetera, just in life, one of my

favorite conversations all year. And I am so glad that she is very graciously helping us close out our season of Poison, and with that, we're gonna do a little what's your poison? Right? It actually references something that comes up in episode two, but it also deals with stuff that Deborah talked about, which is a prohibition era and

so we're doing prohibition eric cocktails for this one. And what I thought might be fun for these these ones as we're nearing the end of the season, is to talk about kind of a classic cocktail and then how you can approach them to maybe customize them to be a little bit more attuned to your palette if they're not for you as written. So, the first one is a side car. A sidecar, you'll see the amounts very slightly, but your basic side car is is usually one and

a half to two ounces of cognac. Anywhere from one half ounce to one ounce of orange liquor. So you're thinking like a triple sec or a quantreaux. You could get crazy and lou use blue curasaw if you wanted. I suppose, um, and then anywhere from a half ounce to like three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice, like freshly squeezed lemon juice. And some people like to garnish with a sugar rim or they'll put an orange twist or both of those. Um, so I made one.

I don't love sidecars, They're just not my jam. I like cognac more in a warm drink, you know, pour it in a latte or a tea or something. Uh perfection exactly. So what I decided to do as a test to see if I can make this a little bit more to my liking, is actually gonna harken back

a little bit to one of our earlier cocktails. Um only because it's one of those one of those spirits you may have on hand if you were following along, and it's one that I bought for this, and I was like, I should use that in more things, so um in lieu of orange liqueur of any kind, but I wanted to keep the lemon juice. Otherwise you're getting too far away from from what a sidecar is. I just used ginger liqueur there. How was that way more palatable for me, less bitey, and I enjoyed it a

lot more. I still would probably not select that over other cocktails that we that we have done this year, or just my usual very boring go to of vodka and diet coke um like clockwork every time. But but it is fun and that's kind of one of the

ways that I like to play with cocktail recipes. So for anyone that's listening, if if you have not really done that before and you look at it just it just becomes a matter of like puzzly problem solving of like, well, this is the one ingredient that is least palatable to me. I wonder what I could do to shift that out and subend something else that will also go with the other ingredients. These are the experiments that will lead you to magical discoveries. You should I feel like, I mean

your kitchen and you're cleaning to right. Absolutely. I have a little lounge area in my kitchen. So you just sit there and I'll just nix in different things to see which one works. Taste that sounds great, and we can train. You can sit and I'll make can taste because it doesn't seem fair. Oh, I don't mind, I'll prep all night. I love it. Uh So, anyway, that is that is this week's poison A sidecar or the

sidecar variation of your choice. I was thinking too that it might be interesting to try other fruit liqueurs in there. I mean, I think if you did like an apple liquor in there, it could be really interesting if you did. Um. I'm trying to think because it is a little bit you know, you're limited what goes well with koa and lemon juice. That won't create cacophony in terms of taste. Um,

but you know the word thing that happens. The worst thing that happens, exactly if you make a terrible mistake, is that you spit it out and dump it down the drink. And it's a small enough drink that you're not wasting a lot of alcohol in that case. This is my wisdom. Don't sweat it. If you throw out an ounce and a half of cod, it's fine. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Do not forget to join us next week for the second part

of Deborah's interview. We will see you then. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.