From 2013: The rise and fall of arsenic as a tool for angry wives, greedy heirs, and other determined murderers.
The first person to come up with a reliable chemical test for arsenic poisoning was an obscure but determined chemist named James Marsh. His procedure, as Hempel explains it, involved feeding sulfuric acid and zinc through an apparatus that combined tubes, rods, stopcocks, nozzles, and a great deal more. Marsh presented his invention in 1836, and won a big prize for it. Arsenic was now traceable in the body.
Melodrama also plays a large role in “The Inheritor’s Powder.” Hempel is fond of foreshadowing, but cliffhangers are her special joy. Just as the freshly poisoned Bodles are staggering around the house, she switches gears and begins a discussion of the history of toxicology. Only about forty pages later do we find out that George died and the others survived. Why the digression? Because, I think, Hempel was worried that her book would be unexciting, or too short.
In dealing with the arsenic fad, Hempel is writing about public health, and the appropriate story to compare with her arsenic book is not another tale of murder but another tale of public health—for example, her preceding book, “” . Here, as is not the case with “The Inheritor’s Powder,” the medical threat was an emergency. There were four major cholera outbreaks in England between 1831 and 1866, causing many thousands of deaths. Furthermore, cholera is more interesting sociologically.
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