American Board of Forensic Dentistry

On the day Deborah Blum set her hair on fire, she was dreaming of being a chemist. One of her long braids brushed a Bunsen burner and a moment later a grad student in the lab said, “Do you smell smoke?”

Whether or not that memorable moment in a college classroom decided the issue, Blum became a journalist instead. She has won a Pulitzer Prize and currently teaches investigative reporting and creative non-fiction at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Still, she never abandoned her inner chemist. And now, after several acclaimed books, including Love at Goon Park and Ghost Hunters, Blum, 55, is awaiting the imminent publication of a new book that places her smack back in the laboratory.

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, due next month, is being heralded as the work of a gifted writer who knows her science.

In an advance review, Publishers Weekly noted “Blum makes chemistry come alive in her enthralling account of two forensic pioneers in early 20th Century New York.... With the pacing and rich characterization of a first-rate suspense novelist, Blum makes science accessible and fascinating.”

Blum’s two protagonists are Alexander Gettler, New York City’s first toxicologist, and Gettler’s boss, Charles Norris, the city’s chief medical examiner.

To say the two have been neglected by history is to understate it. When Blum traveled to New York to view Norris’s papers in the municipal archive, she was initially told a Norris archive did not exist.

It existed, all right, and it helped lead Blum to dozens of cases in which Norris and Gettler pioneered the chemical detective work that identified previously untraceable poisons and convicted numerous murderers who might otherwise have gone free.

Blum and her husband, Peter Haugen, bought a home on Madison’s West Side in August 1997. Deborah, who had attended graduate school at UW-Madison in the early 1980s, was coming back to teach. The move was also designed to give her more time to work on books. She was coming from newspapers. Blum won the Pulitzer in 1992 for her reporting in the Sacramento Bee on the ethics of using primates in research and that in turn led to her first book, “The Monkey Wars.”

The move to Madison triggered a book set in the city. “Love at Goon Park” told the story of Harry Harlow, a UW-Madison psychology professor whose work on the science of affection proved the importance of loving relationships to monkeys and humans. The psychology department was housed at 600 N. Park St., an address that when written hastily on an envelope could appear to say Goon Park — hence the book’s title.

Blum followed with “Ghost Hunters,” the story of scientist and physician William James — brother of the novelist Henry — and his attempt to prove the existence of life after death.

“Poisoner’s Handbook” was suggested by Blum’s agent, who remembered a conversation early in Blum’s career in which she had talked about doing a novel on a poisoner who taunted the police.

The subject had, indeed, always fascinated Blum. There is no ambiguity in a murder by poison.

“Poisoners are planners,” Blum was saying Monday. “They’re the coldest of all killers.”

Until the 1920s, there was often little hope of catching them. Blum recast her early idea as non-fiction and set a wide net in her research — helped by a graduate student assistant, Kajsa Dalrymple — eventually settling on Norris and Gettler, and their work in New York, to tell the tale.

Blum has chapters on cyanides, arsenic, carbon monoxide and other toxins, but all roads lead back to Norris and Gettler, who in their Bellevue Hospital lab matched wits with the poisoners.

“Science is such a human enterprise,” Blum said, which is another way of saying the science is only as good as the people who are applying it. Norris and Gettler were plenty good, and they were occasionally lucky, and now all these years later they’re lucky again. Lucky that Deborah Blum decided to write about them.
Reference:
Moe, D. (2010). Uw journalism prof's book on forensics gets positive reaction. Wisconsin State Journal, Retrieved from http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/doug_moe/article_95870deb-c78f-5eec-a54a-03f950dc2c57.html