Word: thorwald
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...CENTURY OF THE DETECTIVE, by Jürgen Thorwald. The author of The Century of the Surgeon expertly follows the fascinating history of criminology, illustrating it with a gallery of grisly crimes...
Best Reading THE CENTURY OF THE DETECTIVE, by Jiirgen Thorwald. The author of The Century of the Surgeon expertly follows the fascinating history of criminology, illustrating it with a gallery of grisly crimes...
...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...
They still are-with reservations. Fingerprints, says Thorwald, can readily be altered by skin grafting, and the age of microbiology may well produce new possibilities of papillary imposture. ∙ FORENSIC BALLISTICS was largely developed by an idealistic American named Charles Waite, who, until late middle age, could hardly tell a Colt from a filly. In 1917, while holding a minor post in the office of the New York State prosecutor, Waite got interested in the case of a man condemned to death on the evidence of a phony ballistics expert. With the help of a New York City detective, Waite...
Since World War II, says Thorwald, the problem of poisons has gotten dangerously out of hand. Hundreds of toxic agents are now available to millions as pesticides, cleansers, barbiturates and tranquilizers, and many cannot at present be detected in a cadaver. The mod ern world, in Thorwald's opinion, has become a poisoner's paradise in which do-it-yourself-death is on sale at the nearest supermarket-in the handy-dandy family size...