Quotes from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“In a best-selling book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (reprinted nine times by 1935), a pair of consumer-advocate authors complained that American citizens had become test animals for chemical industries that were indifferent to their customers' well-being. The government, they added bitterly, was complicit.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“There was the Bennett Cocktail (gin, lime juice, bitters), the Bee’s Knees (gin, honey, lemon juice), the Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, seltzer water), and the Southside (lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves, gin, seltzer water).”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“In his examination of the young dial painters, he’d discovered a fact that was impossible to dismiss. The women were exhaling radon gas.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“I see poisoners—so calculating, so cold-blooded—as most like the villains of our horror stories. They’re closer to that lurking monster in the closet than some drug-impaired crazy with a gun. I don’t mean to dismiss the latter—both can achieve the same awful results. But the scarier killer is the one who thoughtfully plans his murder ahead, tricks a friend, wife, lover into swallowing something that will dissolve tissue, blister skin, twist the muscles with convulsions, knows all that will happen and does it anyway.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“Standard Oil issued a cool response: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard,” according to the building manager. And those who didn’t survive had merely worked themselves to death. Other than that, the company didn’t see a problem.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“From almost every standpoint ethyl alcohol must be regarded as the most important poison with which medical men and jurists have to deal,” Gettler wrote in a paper, listing a seemingly endless record of fatalities. “No other poison causes so many deaths or leads to or intensifies so many diseases, both physical and mental, as does [this] alcohol in the many forms in which it is taken.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“a cloudy cocktail called Smoke, made by mixing water and fuel alcohol. Smoke joints were tucked into the back of paint stores, drugstores, and markets, among the dry goods and the stacked cans.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“Although traditional weapons killed far more people in the Great War, poison gas gave a new nightmare edge to the fighting.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“That same January the city government had released a report declaring that thanks to ill-informed, corrupt, and occasionally drunken coroners, murderers in New York were escaping justice in record numbers.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“The name explains the structure: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen bond into a ring-shaped structure called a cresol (also found in creosote), and phosphorus hangs on to the ring like an exhausted swimmer gripping a life preserver.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“SCIENTISTS HAD KNOWN since the late nineteenth century that tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide. Victorian scientists had even been able to calculate the amount of gas in the smoke: up to 4 percent in cigarette smoke, and in Gettler’s own choice of tobacco, the cigar, between 6 and 8 percent. Gettler’s latest work theorized that chain smokers might suffer from low-level carbon monoxide poisoning. He speculated in a 1933 report that “headaches experienced by heavy smokers are due in part to the inhalation of carbon monoxide.” But his real interest lay less in their symptoms than in how much of the poison had accumulated in their blood, and how that might affect his calculations on cause of death. He approached that problem in his usual, single-minded way. To get a better sense of carbon monoxide contamination from smoking tobacco, Gettler selected three groups of people to compare: persons confined to a state institution in the relatively clean air of the country; street cleaners who worked in a daily, dusty cloud of car exhaust; and heavy smokers. As expected, carboxyhemoglobin blood levels for country dwellers averaged less than 1 percent saturation. The levels for Manhattan street cleaners were triple that amount, a solid 3 percent. But smokers came in the highest, higher than he’d expected, well above the nineteenth-century calculations. Americans were inhaling a lot more tobacco smoke than they had once done, and their saturation levels ranged from 8 to 19 percent. (The latter was from a Bronx cab driver who admitted to smoking six cigarettes on his way to Gettler’s laboratory, lighting one with the stub of another as he went.) It was safe to assume, Gettler wrote with his usual careful precision, that “tobacco smoking appreciably increases the carbon monoxide in the blood and cannot be ignored in the interpretation of laboratory results.”     THE OTHER NOTABLE poison in tobacco smoke was nicotine.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

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“The idea of holiness is so central to biblical teaching that it is said of God, “Holy is his name” (Luke 1:49). His name is holy because He is holy. He is not always treated with holy reverence. His name is tramped through the dirt of this world. It functions as a curse word, a platform for the obscene. That the world has little respect for God is vividly seen by the way the world regards His name. No honor. No reverence. No awe before Him.”
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“В быстролётные годы расцвета женской красоты она отлично служит притворству, к которому вынуждает женщину её природная слабость и законы нашего общества. Чудесный, свежий цвет лица, блеск глаз, изящный рисунок тонких черт, богатство линий, резких или округлых, но чистых и совершенно законченных, — завеса для всех её сокровенных волнений; если она покраснеет, это не выдаст движения её души, а только оживит и без того яркие краски; огонь её глаз, горящих жизнью, в ту пору скрадывает все внутренние вспышки, и пламя страданий, вырываясь на миг, делает её ещё пленительнее. Итак, нет ничего более непроницаемого, чем молодое лицо, ибо нет ничего неподвижнее. Лицо молодой женщины безмятежно, гладко, ясно, как поверхность дремлющего озера. Своеобразие начинает появляться в женском лице лишь к тридцати годам. До этого возраста художнику не найти в нём ничего, кроме бело-розовых красок, улыбок и выражения, которое повторяет одну и ту же мысль, — мысль о радостях молодости и любви, мысль однообразную и неглубокую; но в старости, когда женщина всё уже испытала, следы страстей словно врезаются в лицо её; она была любовницей, супругой, матерью; самые сильные проявления счастья и горя в конце концов меняют облик человека, искажают черты, бороздя лицо неисчислимыми морщинами, наделяя каждую из них своим языком; и женщина становится тогда величественной в своём страдании, прекрасной в печали своей, великолепной в своей невозмутимости, и если нам позволено будет развить наше необычайное сравнение, то в высохшем озере станут тогда видны следы всех родников, питавших его; тогда лицо женщины уже не привлечёт внимания света, ибо в легкомыслии своём свет будет напуган тем, что разрушены его привычные понятия о красоте; не привлечёт оно и посредственного, ничего не смыслящего художника, зато вдохновит истинного поэта, того, кто наделён чувством прекрасного, кто свободен от всех условностей, на которых зиждется столько ложных понятий об искусстве и красоте.
Люди несчастные, привыкшие взывать к небу с мольбой об утешении в горестях жизни, сразу бы распознали по взгляду этой женщины, что и для неё молитва является единственным прибежищем в повседневных страданиях и что у неё ещё кровоточат те тайные раны, от которых гибнут все цветы души, вплоть до материнских чувств. У живописца есть краски для таких портретов, но никакими словами не передать их; сущность лица, его выражение — само по себе явление необъяснимое, и лишь зрение помогает нам уловить его; у писателя есть только один способ дать представление о страшных переменах, происшедших во внешности его героев: он должен рассказать о тех событиях, из-за которых они появились. Всё в этой женщине говорило о бесшумной ледяной грозе, о тайной борьбе между героизмом страдающей матери и убожеством наших чувств, недолговечных, как и мы сами, в которых нет ничего вечного.
Люди хорошо воспитанные, и особенно женщины, скрытны в проявлении своих чувств, и о волнении их сердца догадается лишь тот, кому довелось испытать в жизни всё, что испытывала исстрадавшаяся мать.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from A Woman Of Thirty

“Falling in love is easy, staying in love is hard. Dedicated to all those who have stayed in love.”
― Emma Chase, quote from Twisted

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