Writing – research – Toxicology-01

No self-respecting crime writer would be without their guide to poisons – the so-called coward’s weapon.

The ancient Greeks called the herb monkshood or wolfsbane “stepmother’s poison”. The citizens of Imperial Rome were forbidden to grow it in their gardens. Yet poison usage was so common that the rich employed food tasters.

There are many known natural poisons, mostly of plant origin. Their attraction – besides their efficacy – was that they were undetectable in a dead body.

More recently the mineral arsenious oxide – arsenic – became readily available for poisoning rats and other vermin. It was the most common substance employed for murder, its faintly sweet taste not noticeable in food; the lethal effects were attributed to acute gastric disease.

In 1836 a simple and definite test for the presence of arsenic in a dead body finally became available, but to get to that point took several chemists several decades. In 1775 the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered that when arsenious oxide was treated with nitric acid and zinc  granules, it became a poisonous gas (subsequently named arsine). Later, German chemist Johann Metzger showed that if arsenious oxide were heated with charcoal a mirror-like deposit would condense on a cold plate held over it; the element arsenic. In 1810 in Berlin Dr Valentine Rose extracted the stomach contents of a suspected victim of poisoning, dried the liquid to a white powder, and heated it with charcoal to obtain the characteristic mirror; thus the Metzger test proved sufficient evidence against a domestic servant who had poisoned several of her employers.

Then in 1832 an elderly English farmer, George Bodle, was alleged to have been poisoned by his grandson John. James Marsh, a former assistant to the eminent scientist Michael Faraday, was asked to demonstrate at the trial that Bodle’s coffee had contained arsenic. He did so, but the jury were not convinced so found the grandson not guilty. Frustrated, Marsh went back to Scheele’s initial discovery and developed the Marsh test – treating the suspect matter with sulfuric acid and zinc, he passed the arsine that was evolved through a narrow glass tube, which was heated over a short distance. The arsenic mirror formed further along the tube; any undecomposed gas was burned at the end of the tube and formed a second mirror on a porcelain plate. As little as 0.02 milligrams of arsenic could be detected in this manner, and in 1836 Marsh was awarded the Gold Medal of the Society of Arts for his technique.

 
The first forensic use of the Marsh test was made by Mathieu Orfila (1787-1853), a Spaniard. In later years, he wrote, ‘The central fact that struck me, that had never been perceived by anyone else … was that toxicology does not yet exist.’

Mateu Josep Bonaventura Orfila - Wikipedia commons

 
He published his first Treatise of General Toxicology in 1813. In 1819 he was appointed professor of medical jurisprudence at Paris University.
 
In 1840 Marie Lafarge, a 22-year-old was accused of murdering her husband. Prosecution declared that arsenic was found in the food, but not in the organs of the body. Orfila used the Marsh test and proved conclusively that the previous tests were botched. Furthermore, he stated; ‘I shall prove, first, that there is arsenic in the body of Lafarge, second that this arsenic comes neither from the reagents with which we worked nor from the earth surrounding the coffin, also that the arsenic we found is not the arsenic component that is naturally found in every human body.’ He did and Marie Lafarge was found guilty and sentenced to prison with hard labour.
 
More to follow in due course.

 

Saturday Story - 'A Shared Experience'

A SHARED EXPERIENCE

  

Nik Morton

A story for Easter

 

My brethren once numbered in the millions.  But that was a long time ago.

Racial memory tells me of great apes who could swing through our forests from dawn until dusk for many days, seemingly without end. 

Now, though, there are no forests here, and no great apes.  Only desert. Our memory goes back even further than mankind's.  We trees share in each other's experiences, down the years, until perhaps the last tree is no more.

            The decimation of our kind began when men started to build ships.  The Phoenicians, the Greeks and Romans, the Turks, all amassed formidable fleets at the expense of our great forests in North Africa. 

Denuded of trees, the land degenerated into desert.

Through our worldwide network we have learned all of mankind's languages, though some of their naming-words are beyond our combined experience: it is a veritable Babel - that's a term from one of their great books.

Unlike we brethren of the green, mankind forgot how to commune through the ether; and they never harnessed a racial memory.  Instead they discovered the transmission of thoughts by written means, first on stone then papyrus and parchment and paper made from our wood.  This written medium enabled them to communicate from beyond the grave: they considered that these invented books were a kind of immortality. 

            And, inevitably, their hunger for printed words took its toll on our brethren too.

            I remember so much, as do we all.  Our lives do not stop when we are felled.  Our senses enter another, different phase, that is all.  We can still perceive through our pores, detecting sounds, smells, temperatures and even, sometimes, thoughts.  If fire takes one of us while we are rooted in the earth, then that tree is no more; but its experience of the world is not lost, its soul is within us all.

* 

The carpenter's hands were gentle, almost loving as he shaped a part of me into a baby's crib.  He was a gifted artisan and though I was shaved into many separate pieces I could not blame him: out of my natural perfection he carved another beautiful form.  A part of my life would share in the growth of another being, imbibing the infant's intellectual awakening.

Other parts of me were transported around the land of Galilee, bartered for and even sometimes fought over.  One beam that was me became soaked in a foolish man's blood: the stain seemed to sum up so much of our relationship with mankind. 

In exchange for the decimation of our millions we shared in new experiences and feelings.

            Another part of me encountered that same carpenter a number of years later.  His blood stained me too as he painfully struggled to carry me on his back up the hill to Golgotha. 

            Strangely, I ached, as did we all in his shared experience, as we sensed the carpenter's agony.

Yet there was no hate in him.  He was strong: I could feel a power capable of felling all our kind at an instant's thought.  But he was in control.  He knew what he was doing.  His purpose was steadfast, inspiring.

All my brethren in the vicinity swayed as the precursor of a storm whipped their leaves.  This was something we had never known before. 

Of all the multitudes of people who had impinged on our very old memory, none had affected us like this man.

When they crucified the carpenter, nailing his wrists into my wood, and his essence mingled with my own, I knew that no matter what privations our brethren suffered, we would survive and even flourish. 

A time would come when trees would be nurtured in their own habitat. 

It would take a long time in arriving, but it would come to pass.

            And I know one day I shall see that carpenter again.

 

***

Previously published in the Easter edition of the Costa TV Times, 2010.

Copyright Nik Morton, 2014.

***

My collection of Spanish themed crime short stories, Spanish Eye, is available from Crooked Cat Publishing.

 

Spanish Eye, which can be purchased post-free world-wide from here

and the Spanish Eye e-book bought from Amazon com here

or bought from Amazon co uk here

 

 

 

 

FFB - Catching the Light

Friday's Forgotten Book:

CATCHING THE LIGHT – The entwined history of light and mind

Arthur Zajonc

Professor Zajonc, a physicist, sets out on a journey of discovery, to answer What is Light? He does not simply employ physics but also poetry, philosophy and art. On the way, we encounter: the ancient Greeks, who apparently had no words for green and blue; India’s Bhagavad-Gita featuring a bard who sings to a blind and worldly royalty; the Arab Alhazen’s improvement on Euclid, supposing ‘the eye, once the site of a sun-like, divine fire, fast became a darkened chamber, awaiting an external force to lighten it.’; and Kepler, Copernicus, Descartes, Goethe, Milton , Twain, Galileo, and Einstein to name but a few. The duality of lights, as both a wave and a particle (as I recall from my Open University course) is echoed in Zajonc’s theme, the duality of the two sides of the brain interpreting the artistic and the mathematical views of light, and is explained clearly and insightfully, with Zajonc mustering some quite poetic prose in the process.

Illustrations are not complex and kept to a minimum; this is not a text-book, more a detective adventure story.

Arthur Zajonc

Kepler

 

The dangers of scientists reducing everything, including beauty, to cold passionless data was long-ago appreciated by many ‘natural philosophers’ such as Faraday and poets like Keats, and every effort was made to retain a sense of wonder at the new discoveries; even the late Richard Feynman said that his appreciation of the beauty of nature was enhanced, not diminished, by his knowledge of physics.

This, then, is a celebration of Light, and of our tentative, often frustrated, fumbling in the dark for that understanding. Light is as much a part of our mind-set as it is an external phenomena. For example, Zajonc cites a patient blind from the age of ten months receiving cornea transplants when he was fifty; when his sight was restored he could not see as his brain had not learned to see: the process of learning was slow and never fully completed.

 

Straddling the scientific and artistic cultures, Zajonc may end up satisfying neither; which would be a pity, as this is an enlightening book for the scientist and the poet, for the layman and the artist.

Published in 1995.