UBC: Emsley, The Elements of Murder

[truepenny]

The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison by John Emsley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is more chemistry than I've thought about since tenth grade.

The Elements of Murder is a much more scientifically in-depth book than Poison: An Illustrated History. In fact, I think it's rather misnamed. It's a history of the heavy metals arsenic, antimony, thallium, lead, and mercury; the uses human societies have put them to; and the (frequently horrifying) consequences thereof. Minamata Bay, anyone? And then it is also a history of the use of these heavy metals for murder. He discusses the terrible death of Sir Thomas Overbury, who was poisoned ineptly for months before his murderers finally managed to kill him with a corrosive sublimate enema. (Corrosive sublimate = mercury chloride). It is the most utterly Jacobean murder imaginable. He analyzes the case against Florence Maybrick (arsenic), reviews the career of Drs. Pritchard and Palmer (antimony), describes the malevolent ingenuity of George Chapman (Severin Klosowski, not the gentleman whose translation of Homer was so inspiring to Keats), and finishes the book with Graham Young (thallium), the most persevering serial poisoner yet discovered. Lead, for all that it is horrifically toxic, is also wildly unpredictable, and so not of much use to poisoners, although Emsley does find Louisa Jane Taylor (whom William Roughead would almost certainly describe as an attaching damsel), who committed murder with sugar of lead (lead acetate).

Emsley explains the chemistry of heavy metals clearly, and provides a chilling panorama of their effects as unintentional poisons.



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