Unknown Narrator / Historian Deborah Blum
Appearances
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E3: Battle Lines
The early 20th century is a uniquely poisonous time for a number of reasons.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E3: Battle Lines
We're seeing the rise of industrial chemistry, and there's a deluge of new chemical compounds created by industries in the United States, which is, you know, one of the countries that really takes the forefront of the industrial manufacturing age. Chemists are figuring out that they can take all of these poisonous substances that occur in nature and recreate them in a laboratory.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E3: Battle Lines
Unless you're rich, you're drinking whatever you can get your hands on. So one of the cocktails of the Bowery, which is a really poor neighborhood in New York, was called Smoke. And that was fuel, alcohol, and water.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E3: Battle Lines
You see Ginger Jack, which was another formula ginned up by bootleggers that actually mimics the symptoms of Parkinson's. Or you see the cocktail called D-Rail, in which they were siphoning off some of the industrial alcohols from the railroads and serving it up in drinks.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E3: Battle Lines
This acceptance of risk that came with Prohibition at these levels is kind of horrifying, but it was there and it was real.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E3: Battle Lines
Gettler goes on to write the fundamental paper on cyanide and its toxicity and how we find it in a body. It's still cited today.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
There were dozens of these formulas, each with a different number, each with a different mix of things.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
The government is starting to go, OK, this isn't working. Let's supercharge poisons into the alcohol that the bootleggers are stealing.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
The police go back to his apartment. They find this dismembered body. I love this story so much. And the...
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
Norris is the on-call medical examiner that night. He goes all the way out to Brooklyn, driven by his chauffeur, to this shabby little back-worker apartment in Brooklyn and goes in.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
He takes one look at it and goes, you know, no, that woman was dead before he cut her up.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
A lot of people lived in buildings that were pretty much equipped by what was called illuminating gas, right? And illuminating gas was a coal-derived gas. It had hydrogen in it, so it was explosive. And it had carbon monoxide in it, so it was poisonous.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
When you are killed by carbon monoxide, your skin flushes a deep pink. So here she is, she's bled out completely, right? She should be pale as a sheet. Instead, she's flush pink because that's what carbon monoxide does.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
They knock a kettle or something over that's boiling away on a gas burner, put out the flame, illuminating gas, which they don't smell, starts seeping into the apartment. And he and Gettler have already shown that when carbon monoxide gets to the kind of level he's looking at, it kills you. So she has to have been dead.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E6: Signature Cocktail
And he goes actually into court opposite to the district attorney and the police department and wins.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
At one point, he was actually forced to buy the clocks on the walls of the medical examiner's office because the mayor put the budget to such an agree that they couldn't even afford clocks.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
As he thinks about organizing his department, the first thing he thinks is, we need a chemist.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
He raised his kids in the middle of this kind of chaos of the Irish-American life in Brooklyn. I think that hugely influenced also his sense of the world because he was so connected to her family.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
As the amendment is circulating and moving forward to when it actually goes into place, around New York City, people are starting to prepare for it by making sure they have their own little home stills or backyard stills or, you know, what people used to call bathtub gin. Even if they can't get it legally, they want those systems in place.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
And they were using wood or other materials that they could easily access in an urban area. And they were making wood alcohol.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
Bellevue was this sort of gothic brick building on the sort of mid to lower east side of Manhattan. There was something about that brick, ivy, gothic look of the place. There was something about, you know, the fact that so many deaths occurred there. It had a kind of mythology about it for a number of reasons.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
They saved a lot of lives, but a lot of people died there, that it just had this kind of reputation of being a slightly haunted place.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
they're really trying to get to the bones of this, right?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
He titles this article, Wood Alcohol Poisoning. He's not messing around. He puts the word poison right in the actual article title. So he says, "...the prohibition by our government of the manufacture of distilled liquors will unquestionably lead to much moonshining adulteration and dilution of the liquors offered to the public."
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
He's saying to doctors around the country, you know, let people know this is dangerous, this is coming, and arm yourself. He said, I want to send up a signal flare. Please take this as a warning. We're at the very start of this. Essentially, what that piece says, in a beautifully scientific way, is I'm not talking about alcohol, I'm talking about poison.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
Before Prohibition really takes off, he's looking the federal government right in the eye and saying, I want to let you know that we're looking at this now. We're seeing people starting to die. This is a terrible idea. Whatever, you know, politics and morality you think is behind what you're doing, the bottom line of what you're going to do is kill people.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
When we're five years into Prohibition, the government is starting to go, okay, this isn't working. What is wrong with the American people?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
They made coroners out of anyone who needed a job, who the party machine owed them a favor.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
There were sign painters, there were milkmen, there were funeral home operators, there were lawyers, and there were notably doctors who were such terrible doctors that they had lost their practices.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
There are death certificates that literally say could be diabetes or possibly an auto accident, right? I mean, you're just going seriously?
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
He was a really big guy, and he had one of those kind of classic spade-like beards. He had a big, booming voice and a Yale football player's presence, and he used it when he needed to.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
He was a descendant of the Norrises who founded Norristown, Pennsylvania. So they were a long-time, well-established, important American family.
SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
He never went anywhere without his being driven by his chauffeur. And even when he went to crime scenes, you know, his chauffeur would take him to the crime scene and he would get out in his cashmere coat and his expensive hat.