Word: arsenous
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...FORENSIC TOXICOLOGY, says Thorwald, is the most troubled of the detective disciplines. The principal problem: chemists have developed new poisons more rapidly than toxicologists have developed methods of detecting them. At the beginning of the 19th century, the big bugaboo was arsenous oxide (also known as "inheritance powder"), a poison that caused symptoms indistinguishable from those of cholera. In 1832, a simple method was developed to detect the arsenic in a cadaver. But by then the chemists had discovered the vegetable alkaloids-morphine, strychnine, cocaine, nicotine, quinine and so on. These poisons seemed to dissolve without a trace...
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