Historical Toxicology (OLD TIMEY POISONS) with Deborah Blum

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

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• 0:44Alie Ward?

  So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right,

• 1:29Alie Ward?

  Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Oh, hey, it's the moldy pumpkin you carved a little too early, Ally Ward. Let's enjoy some poisons. I love this guest. I first met her at a book reading over 10 years ago, and I have 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 a whole stack of books, like Monkey Wars and Ghost Hunters. William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death.

• 2:14Alie Ward?

  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 who send in questions for the ologists before we record. Thanks to everyone in Ologies Merch 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 Smologies. And thank you, as always, to folks who support the show by leaving reviews, which I creep

• 2:59Alie Ward?

  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, iocane powder, arsenic, old lace, poison says self-defense, Black Mirrors, movie myths, and the start of testing

• 3:43Alie Ward?

  for that which ails or kills you with author Chemistry Connoisseur and someone who really knows the history of toxicology, Deborah Blum.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Deborah Blum, she/her.

• 4:13Alie Ward?

  And you are my favorite historian of toxicology. I love your book. Your books in general, they're so beautifully written and there's such a vibe.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  I'll take that.

• 4:29Alie Ward?

  There's nothing better than being a vibe. Were you ever into like kind of spooky things, the dark side of things, or was it the characters in history that really drove you to writing about these types of things?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  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 and 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 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

• 5:25Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 5:49Alie Ward?

  What was it about chemistry that you loved so much, or that you love so much?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  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-filled in a laboratory when I was in college. Well, at the lesser end, I set my hair on fire. No. It was a great moment because, that means 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 brew or the other, I suspect.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  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 as I looked down, my braids were in the Bunsen burner. No. 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 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 like least inspiring way.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  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 was, 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 venoms. 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.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  All of that came together for me when I started thinking, I really want to write about these uniquely fascinating compounds. And, you know, Poisonous 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- Fighting 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.

• 8:44Alie Ward?

  Does it ever annoy you when people will use toxins and venoms or poison and venom interchangeably?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:51Alie Ward?

  Does that ever annoy you?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  So actually, the word toxic and the word poison are not interchangeable because toxins really refer to plant poisons and 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.

• 9:36Alie Ward?

  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.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  But venoms actually are poisons, right? I'm comfortable with using these terms somewhat interchangeably if I think they're correct.

• 9:56Alie 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.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  There is. 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.

• 10:44Alie Ward?

  If you ate scorpion venom, would it be poisonous?

• 10:47Speaker 02

  No, it's a protein and your stomach acid would denature it.

• 10:50Alie Ward?

  So if you ate a scorpion, unless it stung you on the way down,

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:55Alie Ward?

  You're good to go.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  You're good to go.

• 10:57Alie Ward?

  And then it would still be venomous because it wouldn't be digested. So poison versus venom.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  But I would like not recommend eating a thumbtack.

• 11:06Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  So like in that sense, maybe not eat the stinger just because it's like sharp and I don't know what's going to do in your stomach.

• 11:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  It seems like not a good, like not a good look for anyone.

• 11:15Alie Ward?

  Yeah. And also let them live. Let them live. Can I live? 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 of femurs, maybe from different people, whatever you have lying around will do. And then popping that decor above a graveyard or an ossuary.

• 11:59Alie Ward?

  And for more on that, we have a 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 aposemitism. 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

• 12:41Alie Ward?

  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.

• 13:16Alie 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. Yuck, 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,

• 13:59Alie Ward?

  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. Yuck's signature verdant hue. So Mr. Yuck may have been his green, ghastly Frankenstein, but he was anything but. 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?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  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 metaloid 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

• 15:15Speaker 01

  to deposit to the bones, right? But if you're exposed to a plant alkaloid, cyanide, strychnine, 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. Uh, 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 that 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.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  So when people talk about cyanide poisoning, one, they say, how do you disguise the taste? You know, 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.

• 16:30Alie 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.

• 17:15Alie Ward?

  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,

• 17:54Alie Ward?

  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, inflammable 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

• 18:36Alie Ward?

  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, one 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

• 19:21Alie Ward?

  miasmas. I would also like to add that this last paper I read continued that an estimated one 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.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  So the metaloid 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?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could say that.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I'm saying it in the purest poison-loving sense. They were fabulous homicidal poisons. They were tasteless. They were odorless. You could, you know, 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 murderess, Mary Ann Cotton, who killed for almost two decades.

• 20:20Alie Ward?

  No.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Killed children and husbands and lovers.

• 20:23Alie Ward?

  I know you're like, pardon? Mary Ann 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.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  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. We're very familiar to doctors who were working with a whole plethora of infectious diseases.

• 21:11Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Whereas there was no disguise in cyanide.

• 21:14Alie Ward?

  What happens when you are poisoned with cyanide?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  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 will, can take you out in half an hour or so. Right? And sometimes faster, depending on how high the doses, 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 and in a wide body way. And this is a very painful, very fast, very painful death.

• 21:56Alie Ward?

  So it's not inconspicuous?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  So it's not inconspicuous. Exactly.

• 22:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  I'm always kind of like, you're an amateur. You use cyanide.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Oh dear.

• 22:08Alie Ward?

  Was arsenic just like the gold standard for hundreds of years?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  It was. And by the time we got to the 19th century, in Europe, it was nicknamed the inheritance powder in France.

• 22:21Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Poudre de succession because.

• 22:24Alie Ward?

  Oh, harsh.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:55Alie Ward?

  That's true, man.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  It just cracked me up. But it was used in medications. Stricknalline 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 and arsenic based green dyes were used in wallpaper. They were used to color candy, right? Cake decorations. So you have this.

• 23:35Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:13Alie Ward?

  So yeah, this Victorian era green was named Shields Green. After its inventor, and according to one piece in the Paris Review titled Shields "Green: The Color of Fake Foliage and Death," this arsenic-containing Shields green was a vegetal color, like fiddleheads and ivy vines. And for city dwellers, the allure of Shields 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

• 24:54Alie Ward?

  toxicology episode. We do do it. We are doing it right now. Do you have any idea how many microplastics and PFOS are in my blood? Me neither. Oh, well. 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.

• 25:39Alie Ward?

  How goth, and not that much worse than heroine 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 Trisonox, 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 Trisonox 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. Were people dropping like flies when they were eating it on cakes and taking it for

• 26:22Alie Ward?

  beauty treatments? Like, was it at concentrations where it would take years before it got you?

• 26:28Speaker 01

  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?

• 26:55Alie Ward?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  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 penny candy, and it was sold to kids all around this part of Northeast England. I think almost 2,000 children died.

• 27:17Alie 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 Billy. But each candy that he sold that day

• 27:59Alie Ward?

  unwittingly contained double the lethal dose for an adult. And yeah, 20 people died. Humbug Billy also was sickened. He remained partially paralyzed for life.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  So that actually was the inspirational 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

• 28:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:38Alie Ward?

  Yeah, you're like, oh, my blood sugar. I gotta be lactose intolerant. Meanwhile, you're just gulping down arsenic.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Whereas if it was cyanide, you would be like, I'm in big trouble right this minute. Right? Very different.

• 28:52Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I've heard you say before that arsenic is your favorite poison.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  It is.

• 28:57Alie Ward?

  Is that true?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Totally my favorite poison. And even though it's hard to get, right? And that's partly because, you know, it's, 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 the 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.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  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. There was a point in the 20th century in which they discovered they had part per

• 30:26Speaker 01

  million levels of arsenic in groundwater in Taiwan, and people started developing gangrene in their feet.

• 30:32Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  And it was strictly related to the destruction of blood vessels related to the arsenic in the water.

• 30:38Alie 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.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  And that's why the US drinking water standard for arsenic is 10 parts per billion.

• 31:13Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Really, really small.

• 31:15Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  So it's like a beautiful example of a very multi-talented poison. 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 is just incredibly interesting.

• 31:43Alie Ward?

  Was arsenic the first poison 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?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  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, right?

• 32:15Alie Ward?

  I know.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  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

• 32:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:40Alie Ward?

  I thought maybe the Borgias 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 Borja 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.

• 33:24Alie Ward?

  But people could still get away with it if it weren't for those nosey 1800s pioneers of toxicology.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  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 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, Mateo of Orfala, who just started saying, we've 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 catch an arsenic murderer.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  And Marsh was so angry, he just went into his lab and a kind of I'm in hermit, don't bother me, I'm going to figure out how to detect arsenic 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, you know, 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

• 35:15Speaker 01

  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. Oh. 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.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  What are you cooking? 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.

• 36:16Alie 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 part of our Callology episode on historical beauty standards, beauty is pain. By that, I mean a slow death from metaloid poisonings. You leave a gorgeous corpse, though.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  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 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 Handbook.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  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?

• 37:53Alie Ward?

  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 must be like, shoot, we're busted. And then we gotta go to like Foxglove or something or...

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Most of the plant alkaloids are pretty visible deaths. Look, strychnine is also neurotoxic and bitter and fast-acting. Aconitine, you know, is found in 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...

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Understanding cyanide would definitely help you start to figure out how to understand a neurotoxic alkaloid like strychnine.

• 38:50Alie 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've got owls coming up.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:23Alie 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 murderers, 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 Getler and persuaded him to found and direct the city's first toxicology laboratory. Together, Norris and Getler elevated forensic chemistry in this country to a formidable science.

• 40:08Alie Ward?

  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.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:42Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  So recognizing that, you know, the toxicology was there, but it wasn't fully developed.

• 40:51Alie Ward?

  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?

• 41:20Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 Getler 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.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  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 Getler 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

• 42:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Which is, if you think about it, like, where did that knowledge come from? Someone has to start, apparently, by looking at 8,000 brains, right?

• 43:09Alie Ward?

  So many.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  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 wavelengths. 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 it. 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.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  The caveat to that is that, one, you know, sometimes you also have to know what you're looking for. And so a- 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.

• 44:22Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:32Alie Ward?

  What a jabberony.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  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, right? 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?

• 45:17Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God. Uh, did she, and she survived?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  No, she died.

• 45:21Alie Ward?

  Oh, fuck. Oh, man. 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

• 46:05Alie Ward?

  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. Which movies get it right and wrong? What books get it right and wrong? Does it absolutely drive you crazy?

• 46:41Speaker 01

  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 chopped 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. Uh huh. And I'm like, it did not. I was literally yelling at the screen, 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.

• 47:20Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  It's not even acidic enough to cause milk to curdle in a cup of coffee, right? I mean, it's 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, right? Cyanide kills you, but it doesn't kill you that fast. And so I was like, get a grip here. At least get it right. So yes,

• 48:02Speaker 01

  I am exactly the person who my husband leaves the room if we're watching a movie that he goes poison. So I was like, no, no, it didn't happen that way. No.

• 48:14Alie Ward?

  What about the song Poison by Bell Biv Devote? You remember that?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Oh, that girl is poison. I love that song. I really do.

• 48:24Alie Ward?

  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 got to blast.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  I would love that. Right. So.

• 48:34Alie Ward?

  I have questions from listeners. Can I ask them?

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 48:37Alie Ward?

  Okay. Amazing. They had great questions. 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 Earth Justice. 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, seven 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

• 49:22Alie Ward?

  Central Kitchen, thank you for all you do. WCK MVPs. And Earth Justice is the nation's leading environmental law organization. And for more than 50 years, Earth Justice 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. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies

• 50:02Alie Ward?

  for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening.

• 50:47Alie Ward?

  They have templates. They have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients. You can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend. Give the gift of bike riding confidence this year and help Peppa learn to ride her bike. Kids can imagine learning to ride a bike with the Ready Pedal Go Peppa Bicycle Playset.

• 51:33Alie Ward?

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• 52:50Alie Ward?

  Okay, let's 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 them. Patrick Duffy, Curtis Dog, Teal, Misty Benz, Erennerby, Ray Moore, 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?

• 53:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:39Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I love that. That didn't, they had to take that out because there was such an outcry. But, 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.

• 54:08Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  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 going to 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 of reasons. It's clever, it takes planning, it's less confrontational.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  You know, you're a planner and a plotter and you think you can get away with it, right? It appeals to people who like to plan.

• 54:59Alie Ward?

  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 counterattack

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:13Alie Ward?

  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?

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Right. In the 19th century and especially, it was a self-defensive move. And actually, there was a science historian from Caltech, Dan Kevliss, who wrote about this and he called poison the great equalizer in the 19th century.

• 55:44Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  You know, 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, right? 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, you know, we're looking at total. Perfect balance of power here, but women were really powerless.

• 56:25Alie 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 cosigner. 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.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  And so they both worked in the home where they had access to all of these poisons, right? Arsa, as I mentioned, was in all kinds of different things. Cyanide and silver polish, 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

• 57:26Speaker 01

  policies on their intended victims before they kill their children and their husbands and their lovers, right?

• 57:33Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  So are women capable of being predatory, terrible people? Of course we are.

• 57:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm wondering, several people, Kayla, Lunar Crumpet, Azia Herminologist, Sarah Mans, Brenna Hull, Sabrina Motto, Mouse Paxton, and Patrick Duffy, all wanted to know, a few people in all caps, about Aqua Tofanas.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 57:53Alie Ward?

  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?

• 58:01Speaker 01

  I mean, I actually have a whole section in my upcoming book on Aqua Tofanas because it's so interesting. So if you go onto the internet and you Google the name Julia Tofanas, you'll often see people saying that, you know, she's linked to 600 deaths. And so Juliette Tofanas is considered the name of the woman who sort of put the liquid Aqua Tofanas into homicidal circles in Renaissance Rome. And so the story is that she developed this particular compound.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Again, it was sort of an enhanced arsenic compound, not unlike what we think of as the Borgia Enhanced Arsenic, which was is called La Cantarella. But Aqua Tofanas was a liquid that was arsenic based but improved on, right? So that it worked a little faster. And Juliette Tofanas 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 harmless.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Some of them were actually in bottles suggesting that they were holy water

• 59:27Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:35Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's dark.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  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 Juliette Tofanas network and they would get Aqua Tofanas. 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 was had been poisoned by Aqua Tofanas. That whole sort of legend that he was poisoned by another composer is based on the fact that he wrote that.

• 1:00:21Alie Ward?

  Do you think it's true?

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:42Alie 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 Aqua Tofanas, the arsenic lady.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:26Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I've seen so many comments from people who will say, well, you know, she stood up for women when we were completely oppressed. What else could they do? It's a really interesting perspective.

• 1:01:36Alie Ward?

  Is there ever evidence of anyone who was enslaved or indigenous folks who fought back with maybe plant alkaloids that they had available?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  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 going on? When I got into that, one of the things I discovered was that certainly in the British colonies like Jamaica, say, that were, you know, built on a slave economy, or in the slave economies of the American South, now we're talking 17th and 18th century,

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  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 masters. And you actually find documents in which the slave owners are working to restrict access to plants, certain plants.

• 1:02:50Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow. Yeah.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  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 rebellion.

• 1:03:08Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  It runs through our sort of history of the use of poison i- in a very consistent way.

• 1:03:14Alie Ward?

  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 last listener question, so many people, Brenn Hall, Allison, Bello Len, Dana Irs, Audrey Hudak, Andrew McKay, Felix LaSalle, Maddie Julian, Figment, they all want to know iocane powder. Maddie says, I've heard you can build up a tolerance to poisons if you microdose them enough, like iocane powder in The Princess Bride. So many

• 1:03:59Alie Ward?

  people mention The Princess Bride. I'm sure you know the scene, right?

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:03Alie Ward?

  Of course.

• 1:04:08Alie Ward?

  What's going on?

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  And that's a great movie.

• 1:04:10Alie Ward?

  It's so good. It's one of my favorites. Iocane, does it exist? Can you build up an immunity to it?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  I think it's a fabulous fictional poison.

• 1:04:21Alie Ward?

  Okay, they did a good job.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  But it's based actually on like, an old mythology about arsenic.

• 1:04:29Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  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 part rebellion level, right? 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 Sayer, 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

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  victim can eat the same arsenic-dosed meal, but one of them has built up a tolerance to arsenic.

• 1:05:19Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:21Alie Ward?

  But truthfully. Not a lot of truth in it?

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  No, 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

• 1:05:35Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  It's not gonna protect you. There are chemical compounds that we, through repeated exposure, habituate to. If you continually take opioid narcotics, 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 will become alcoholics. Their 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.

• 1:06:09Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I've definitely found that after the holiday season, one glass of wine doesn't hit the same.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. Your body is ramping up to deal with this, right? I don't drink nearly as much as I used to. And so I, you know, I find to my annoyance, partly to my annoyance, that, you know, one glass of wine, and I'm like, wow, one glass of wine, I'm really feeling it.

• 1:06:33Alie 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 overdoses, this is tragically true. And per this 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 take.

• 1:07:18Alie Ward?

  I'm clean, 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.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  And I want you to have a good one.

• 1:07:50Alie Ward?

  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.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, can you imagine? I mean, some of the health advice you hear this day, I just wanna like go put my head. It was elderberry, right? Like, there's certain formulations of elderberry that contain cyanide. Cyanide's a naturally occurring sugar in many plants. It's a glycos cyanide. We find it in all kinds of peach bits 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.

• 1:08:38Alie Ward?

  No. And of course, per our foraging ecology episode and mycology episode, 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. You've said that like poisoning is kind of the coldest, premeditated, you have to be patient with it, you have to really know what you're doing. It's not typically a crime of passion to poison someone with arsenic over a period of several weeks or months.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  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, um, but, uh, I'm, you know, I'm really pissed off at you. I'm gonna research the best possible poisonous delivery method.

• 1:09:35Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God. Let's hope no one's on ChatGPT. You know what I mean?

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:41Alie Ward?

  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?

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Yes, the aftermath of murder is almost, uh, 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 in 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.

• 1:10:35Alie Ward?

  Her name was Lillian Cuts.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  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 had wanted to make her daughter a boxed 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're thinking, I failed to save my child's life. Right. I should have pushed harder. I would do that to myself, right? I know. And I could, you could just hear it in everything she was saying. And so I started with a particular example leading into the story of arsenic. And after the book came out, a man wrote me from Seattle

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  and he said, you've solved a family mystery for me. And I knew my great aunt had died when she was really young, but no one would ever tell him why.

• 1:11:31Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  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, right?

• 1:11:49Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  And I thought about that all these decades later. A hundred 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, you know, 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 the suffering, you know, continues for generations. And so I have to really allow myself to know that.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  And I think it makes me a better writer because, you know, I never think of anyone I'm writing about as just a narrative device. I know they're real people.

• 1:12:44Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  But I think when you write about bad things as often as I do, you also have to really compartmentalize it. 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 on to 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 comit pack 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.

• 1:13:28Alie Ward?

  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, you know, become a writer or to look into something?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  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, Ally, 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 It had the body cremated, as all good poisoners do, right?

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  But he had rushed down to the mortuary in the mi- uh, at night before they actually fired up the furnace or whatever, and ripped hair out of his brother's head for testing.

• 1:14:43Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  And so he had it in a box and he wrote me and he said, what do you think I should test for? And I'm like, I have no idea, right?

• 1:14:53Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:15:31Alie Ward?

  Yeah. For now, though, people can find The Poisoner's 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 party guest at any dinner party you go to. You're a great one to have. This has been amazing.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  I enjoyed it a lot. And actually, a lot of people won't eat dinner with me at all, so.

• 1:15:56Alie Ward?

  That girl's poison.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. I sure really should make that my theme song.

• 1:16:06Alie 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 at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Ali Ward on both. Smologies are Shorter, kid-friendly episodes. Link to the show notes. Ologies merch is available at 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.

• 1:16:50Alie Ward?

  Aveline Malik makes the professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our sweet 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.

• 1:17:35Alie Ward?

  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 okefs. 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.

• 1:18:19Alie Ward?

  And you do that for like a couple of days in a 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 gonna go nap. Bye-bye.

• 1:18:59Speaker 05

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