Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination (review)

In the catalog of nineteenth-century phobias, being poisoned ranked right up there with being buried alive. But whereas premature interment was mostly confined to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, criminal poisoning leaped from the pages of fiction to real life with alarming frequency.

The crime posed special problems for legal and scientific experts, as Ian Burney details in his concise, elegant study, Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination. Because poison did its work within the body, "beneath the threshold of perception," proof of poison had to be "traced out from evidence of the unseen" (p. 5). Toxicology thus required imagination—"the power of representing things absent," as Samuel Johnson defined it (p. 9n13)—but that power brought hazards as well as rewards.

In chapter 1, Burney examines poison as "a specifically modern concern." Because the crime was carried out through deception and worked on bodily interiors, poisoning became the "emblematic crime" of the nineteenth century, a time when market forces and social mobility created a generalized "loss of legibility" (pp. 15–16). Court records indicate that the mid-nineteenth century saw a boom in poisoning, and especially in crimes involving difficult-to-detect substances.

Battling such subtle arts required sophisticated legal and scientific tools, and Burney traces the institutionalization of medical jurisprudence and its most prominent branch, toxicology, in chapter 2. Scientists attempted, with limited success, to banish the mythical associations of poisoning—Homer's Circe, Lucretia Borgia—and place it on scientific footing. Experts worked to contain poisons by defining the term (e.g., how is a poison different from a medicine?), mastering their detection, and pushing for regulations to limit their availability.

In chapter 3, Burney describes these containment efforts at work in the laboratory and the courtroom, as toxicologists developed tests and attempted to transfer their expertise into an adversarial legal culture. The law, often stymied by poisoning cases, counted on toxicologists to dig into messy human interiors and produce unassailable proof, such as a glistening film of pure arsenic. This ability to make the invisible visible could "cause the vulgar to marvel" (p. 6), as one expert said at the time, and contributed to an aura of magic surrounding toxicology.

But the tricks often fell flat, as detailed in chapter 4's account of one celebrated poisoning trial. William Palmer was a physician and gambler suspected of killing several people for life insurance payouts; he was tried in 1856 on suspicion of using strychnine to kill a gambling associate. The case became "a touchstone of poison anxiety" (p. 121), hinting at dangers lurking within Victorian domesticity, exposing fears surrounding financial speculation and life insurance, and revealing that a physician could pervert professional knowledge for wicked ends.

Toxicologists had vowed that they could expose even the most skillful poisoner, but that claim appeared dubious. Palmer's twelve-day trial featured more than thirty expert witnesses, much of whose testimony was devoted to the failure of chemical tests to find evidence of strychnine. Prosecution witness Alfred Swain Taylor, the era's most celebrated poison expert, insisted that the victim's symptoms were sufficient to prove murder. The defense argued, however, that Taylor's imagination had run wild, allowing him to find evidence of things not only unseen but also not there.

Palmer was convicted and executed, but the trial "raised searching questions about the standing of toxicology" (p. 158), as Burney details in chapter 5. Scientific problems emerged in other poisoning trials, and physicians grew nervous about the spectacle of expert disagreement damaging the profession. The situation forced toxicologists to adopt a less heroic posture in which they argued (in vain) for revisions to trial process, kept a closer watch on scientific procedures, and even deferred to the public's doubts about the value of expertise.

Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination is, in part, the story of scientific overreaching brought low by legal procedure and public exposure, but what brings the story alive is...