I’ve just finished reading a rather unusual book by Jewish author Deborah Blum.¹ It’s called The Poisoner’s Handbook, and it’s a fascinating tale of forensic medicine. It tells the story of the rise of scientific methods for detecting the presence of different poisons in the human body.

This branch of science is a way of determining cause of death—and the case, or lack thereof, for murder by poison. The book is even divided into chapters by poison: methyl alcohol, mercury, radium, carbon monoxide. It’s like the Addams Family wandered into a chemistry lab!

The book’s chief protagonist, toxicologist Alexander Gettler, is Jewish, though nothing is really made of that (a passing mention lets on Gettler’s background). Much, however, is made of the poisons in question: their origin, their discovery, and especially how during Prohibition, low-quality (read, essentially made of poison) drinks pervaded society.

But it turns out that in the early twentieth century, you could die by multiple means. Radium, at one point, was thought to be a kind of cure-all: health tonics were made from it. What it “cured” was life itself—the so-called Radium Girls who worked in factories making luminous dials discovered their bones falling apart and their jaws collapsing. They even exhaled radon gas.

Today, between the FDA, non-GMO labeling, and more initials (too many to remember), we’ve come a long way in putting physical poisons out of reach. But what about the poison that we cannot see? The moral poison that is human evil remains real—out of reach of government regulations or scientific exposés.

There’s a reason why carbon monoxide has earned the nickname “the silent killer.” And the girls who worked with radon thought they were just earning a living. None of us sets out to become sick. Yet there are things that can cause sickness in us slowly.

At Yom Kippur, we name the moral poison. We call it “sin.” Orthodox Jews relate it to something called the yetzer ha-ra, the built-in evil inclination in all people (it lives alongside the good inclination). More secular people tend to say that “mistakes were made.” Indeed.

I commend The Poisoner’s Handbook as a good read. I also recommend thinking about what the book doesn’t cover, but which could be a book all on its own: moral poison—what it is and what we can do about it.

I haven’t written that book on moral poison (yet), but here are two more articles you can read for a deeper dive on these questions: What Is Sin and What Did Jesus Say About Atonement?

Endnotes

[1] Deborah Blum, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).