The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum Read Free Book Online

Norris loved the job of chief medical examiner. He lived it and breathed it. He spent his own money on it. He gave it power and prominence and wore himself into exhaustion and illness over it. Under his direction, the New York City medical examiner’s office would become a department that set forensic standards for the rest of the country. And Norris himself would become something of a celebrity, described by Time magazine as the “famed, sardonic, goat-bearded, public spirited” medical examiner who “battled for pure food laws, fought against quack doctors, Prohibition, unsanitary restaurants, pronounced on many a suicide and murder that perplexed police, made his name and detective work known in medico-legal circles the world over.”
    The key term in that exuberant, lengthy description, the reason Norris accepted one of the most spectacularly reluctant job offers in the city’s history, could be found in those two words “public spirited.” Journalists tended to emphasize the public side of Norris’s personality—the outsize former-college-football-player build, the buoyant laugh and quick wit, the dramatic face with its intense dark eyes and lowering eyebrows—and gloss over the intense sense of purpose that really defined the man.
    Everyone knew that Norris didn’t have to work for the money. His father, Joseph Parker Norris, was a descendant of the merchant banker family that had founded Norristown, Pennsylvania; his mother, Frances Stevens Norris, was a daughter of the first president of the Bank of Commerce in New York City. Born on December 4, 1867, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Norris began his schooling at Cutler’s Private School, a tony little Manhattan institution founded by the Harvard-educated tutor of Theodore Roosevelt. He then went to Yale University, where he earned a bachelor of philosophy with an emphasis on science; from there he went to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he received his doctorate in medicine in 1892. He then studied abroad, first at a series of medical schools in Germany, then in Vienna, where he decided to specialize in pathology and bacteriology. He returned to New York in 1896 and took a job as a pathology lecturer at Columbia. In 1904 he left to become director of the main laboratory at Bellevue and Allied Hospitals.
    People would forget, as Norris assumed the mantle of public crime fighter, how much he enjoyed basic medical research. While at Columbia and Bellevue, he published paper after paper on infectious disease: “The Bactericidal Action of Lymph Taken from the Thoracic Duct of the Dog,” “Spirochetal Infection of White Rats,” “Influence of Fasting on the Bactericidal Action of the Blood,” “Anterior Poliomyelitis,” “Detection of Typhoid Carriers,” and even “Red Leg in Frogs,” an analysis of an extremely nasty bacterial infection that broke blood vessels apart, staining once-green limbs red.
    As fascinating as the research could be, it barely tapped Norris’s reservoir of energy or his capacity for public service. He’d been brought up in the tradition: his childhood had steeped him in stories of his ancestors’ contributions to their country. Eighteenth-century Norris family members fought in the Revolutionary War, even stripped the lead gutters and rain spouts from their Philadelphia home to make bullets for the Continental Army. His banker grandfather, John Austin Stevens, had negotiated the first loan of $100 million to allow the federal government to finance the Civil War.
    In an essay on forensic medicine, Norris would muse on the need for doctors and scientists to lend their talents to criminal investigation, even if it meant less lucrative employment: “A much neglected field of medical endeavor is open to those of us who pursue this widely important branch.” What would happen if researchers didn’t contribute to the field? he asked, and answered: “Grave injustice to the relatives of the deceased . .