Page 16 - Pharmacy History 31 Mar 2007

Book review
The Elements of Murder a History of Poison
By John Emsley,
Oxford University Press 2005. pp. xiii+418 including Index, Bibliography and Glossary.
John Emsley is establishing himself as a popular science writer, having a number of popular titles against his name, including The Shocking History of Phosphorous and Vanity, Vitality and Virility, and now this. After 20 years as a lecturer in chemistry at London University he became a freelance popular science writer, also twice being a science writer in residence, first at Imperial College London and then in the Chemistry Department at the University of Cambridge. In 1995 he won the Science Book prize for his Consumer’s Good Chemical Guide and in 2003 he was awarded the German Chemical Society’s Writer’s Award. He bids fair to join a number of successful, popular writers on science and its history – Dava Sobel, Margaret Wertheim, and Simon Winchester, to name but a few. But to achieve this securely he really should do something to reduce his error rate.
On page 41 Emsley assesses a teaspoonful of mercury II chloride as weighing in at 20,000mg. Now dense it might be, but that dense? [One teaspoonful of water — one fluid drachm — weights about 5g.] Similarly on page 190 he takes three grains as 250mg when 195mg would be closer the mark. Again on page 218, 25g of antimony potassium tartrate is deemed as being two teaspoonsful. Even allowing again for greater density, that seems odd as that weight of water would measure five teaspoonfuls by volume. There are also solecisms. For example, on page 231 one reads ‘The writer, who signed themselves’ and on page 343 one finds that ‘Graham he set fire to’. Oxford could probably have done better.
These irritants do not greatly detract from an intelligent and thoroughly entertaining discussion of murderous heavy metal poisons. For each of mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead and thallium, Dr Emsley looks at their occurrence in nature, including the human body, and their common uses and abuses. He examines
their persistence in the body as well as its requirements and their metabolism and excretion. Then he turns homicidal by evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of
Howell’s safety Closure 1886 Stites Cross Bones stopper 1883 Bailey Safety Alarm corkscrew.
1 ■ Pharmacy History Australia
volume 3 ■ no 31 ■ MARCH 2007
each as poisons — stability, ease of administration, symptoms, lethal doses, the fate of the poison in the body and its durability and hence
the ease of tracing and detecting it. Thallium, we learn, can be detected
in cremated remains and the levels ingested thus ascertained. Hair often provides excellent evidence years
after the subject died, and can even indicate the stages of ingestion and likely dose through detecting different residues at different points along the same strand of hair, rather like one
of Simon Winchester’s geological sections. Of course detection and assay has improved markedly, and there have been refinements regarding what may be termed normal concentrations of the various metals
in bone, brain, liver as well as hair and so forth.
This discussion is framed between the early parts of each chapter dealing with occurrence of substances in various parts of the body and
their function, and fascinating case studies of famous criminal cases and the resulting trials, chiefly British. Some assessment is made of the psychology or motivation of poisoners ranging from the opportunist to the pathological.
The final section of the book looks briefly at a number of other potential poisons — barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, fluoride, nickel, potassium, selenium, sodium, tellurium and tin.