Word: thorwald
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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...
...solved by the comparison of fingerprints, and that solution constituted a major breakthrough for the infant science of criminology. In less than a century, that science has developed from rule of thumb into an enormously intricate medico-legal discipline, and the story of its development, as described by Jurgen Thorwald (The Century of the Surgeon) with impressive literary and scientific competence, is a tale of blood and bloodhounds, wills and pills, pathologists and psychopaths. For sheer suspense and wallowing aceldama, it is worth a hundred whodunits...
...Author Thorwald considers his sub ject in four tidy divisions. ∙ CRIMINAL IDENTIFICATION, the funda mental problem of detection, began to be a science in 1879, when Alphonse Bertillon introduced a system of anthropometry involving some eleven bodily measurements of each criminal. Fingerprinting, long a form of signature in the Orient, was introduced to Europe by Britain's William Herschel, and it had to compete with anthropometry until 1904, when two prisoners at Fort Leavenworth were found to have identi cal features, practically identical anthropometric measurements and identical names: Will West. Only their fingerprints were different, and within seven...
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...