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

In the 1930s, the American public became increasingly suspicious of the number of chemicals in everyday products. Such fears were further stoked by the publication of the book 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs by “a pair of consumer-advocate authors” who detailed some of the toxic chemicals that many Americans were actively ingesting in the form of medicines and beauty products (245). One of the chemicals the book drew attention to was thallium, which was in numerous facial creams despite the fact that thallium was widely accepted to be “one of the most deadly known poisons” (247). The chemical was initially discovered by the British scientist William Crookes, who named it after the “sudden brilliant green” light that appeared when it was placed inside a spectroscope (249). Though Crookes initially claimed the chemical to be harmless, scientists would later discover that it could be highly toxic to the human body, typically causing death if just “a third of an ounce” was consumed (253).

Thallium gained widespread notoriety due to its role in the highly-publicized murder trial of Frederick Gross. Over the course of April 1935, four of Gross’s children and his wife fell ill and died, while Gross’s fifth child and mother-in-law were sick and in the hospital. Though the deaths had initially been deemed to be sudden bouts of pneumonia and encephalitis, doctors grew suspicious at the number of deaths and cases of sickness while the father remained in good health. The police suspected that the pressures of caring for so many family members “might just have been too much for him” (255), driving him to poison his family. When the cadavers were sent to Gettler for analysis, he was able to identify the presence of thallium in all of the dead except for the wife, who had “apparently died of encephalitis, as originally diagnosed” (259). The police learned that Gross’s wife had expressed suicidal and homicidal desires to her neighbors and ruled that she had been the culprit of the poisonings, exonerating Gross of the crimes. 

In the fall of 1935, Norris returned from a cruise vacation, fell ill, and died. In the wake of his death from heart failure, “tributes came from around the world” honoring Norris’s tireless work in establishing the field of forensic medicine (265). Shortly after Norris’s death, Gettler became involved in the trial of Mary Frances Creighton. Gettler had offered analysis in defense of Creighton 12 years earlier, when Creighton was accused of murdering her brother and mother-in-law with arsenic. Creighton was accused of conspiring with Everett Applegate to poison Applegate’s wife, Ada, so that Applegate could abscond with Creighton’s 15-year-old daughter. Gettler’s autopsy revealed that Ada had been murdered with a heavy dose of arsenic, evidence that led to the conviction of Creighton and Applegate. In the lead-up to the trial, Creighton confessed to a psychologist that she had murdered her brother with arsenic—a revelation that Blum notes “gave Gettler a jolt” (268). 

In the Epilogue, Blum explores the influence that Gettler and Norris had on the developing field of forensic science. Following Norris’s death in 1935, Gettler remained in his position for more than 20 years, finally “retiring at the age of seventy-five” in 1959 (275). While Gettler continued his work of analyzing bodies, he also became a prominent teacher, sharing his methods with numerous students who subsequently founded their own toxicology labs throughout the United States. During Gettler’s tenure, toxicology was based upon “wet chemistry,” involving chemical analysis of living tissues that could often be messy and somewhat gruesome. In the decades that followed, toxicologists instead turned to rely on machinery to conduct analyses, dispensing with Gettler’s hands-on methods for identifying toxic substances in a cadaver. Though Gettler was publicity adverse, he allowed himself to be interviewed for a 1955 issue of Harper’s magazine. During the interview, he revealed that he was always plagued by lingering doubts: “I keep asking myself, have I done everything right?” (278).