Health& History• 9/1 • 2007 159 too sweeping- the Scots in Sydney would more readily associate the name infirmarywith the acute general hospitals in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and many other Scottish cities and towns. All in all, however, this is a fine example of the biographer's craft and one which adds to our understanding of nursing and hospital development in Australia. DEREK A. DOW THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND John Emsley, The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ISBN 0-19-280609-9. pp. xiii+418 including Index, Bibliography and Glossary. Emsley is establishing himself as a popularscience writer,having a numberof populartitles against his name, including TheShocking History of Phosphorous and Vanity, Vitality and Virility. After twenty years as a lecturer in chemistry at London University he became a freelance popular science writer, as well as twice being a science writer in residence, first at Imperial College London and then in the Chemistry Departmentat the University of Cambridge. In 1995 he won the Science Book prize for his Consumers Good Chemical Guide and in 2003 he was awarded the German Chemical Society's Writer'sAward. He bids fair to join a number of successful, popular writers on science and its history- Dava Sobel, MargaretWertheim, and Simon Winchester, to name but a few. In my opinion, however, to achieve this securely he really should do something to reduce his errorrate, as the book contains many small numeric and grammaticalerrors. However, the errorsdo not greatly detract from an intelligent and thoroughly entertaining discussion of murderous heavy metal poisons. Foreach of mercury,arsenic, antimony, lead andthallium, Dr Emsley looks at theiroccurrence in nature,including the human body, and their common uses and abuses. He examines their persistence in the body as well as their metabolism and excretion. Then he turns homicidal by evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of each as poisons- stability,ease of administration, symptoms, lethal doses, the fate of the poison in the body and its durabilityand hence the ease of tracing and detecting it. Thallium, 160 BOOKREVIEWS we learn, can be detected in cremated remains and the levels ingested thus ascertained. Hair often provides excellent evidence years after the subject has died, and can even indicate the stages of ingestion and likely dose through detecting different residues at different points along the same strandof hair,ratherlike one of Simon Winchester's geological sections. Of course detection and assay has improved markedly, and there have been refinements regardingwhat may be termednormalconcentrationsof the various metals in bone, brain, liver as well as hair and so forth. Thisdiscussion is framedbetween theearlypartsof eachchapter dealing with occurrence of substances in various parts of the body and their function, and fascinating case studies of famous criminal cases and the resulting trials, chiefly British. Some assessment is made of the psychology or motivation of poisoners ranging from the opportunistto the pathological. The final section of the book looks briefly at a number of other potential poisons- barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, fluoride, nickel, potassium, selenium, sodium, tellurium and tin. The richtopic Emsley has ably essayed is endlessly fascinating. One could ask for more in almost every direction- more substances, more forensics, more case studies, more on treatment andantidotes. Recently renewed interestin Sydney's famous Bogle Chandler case and the mystery regarding the cause of the illicit lovers' deaths is one suggestion of this. The recent London murder of former Russian KGB agent, Alexander Litvinenko by persons so far unknown by polonium 210 is another.In this case, not only is therethe radioactive trailfrom London to Moscow, but 210Po, the Curies' very rareelement, weight for weight, is millions of times more toxic than hydrocyanic acid and its lethal dose is measured in nanograms- the LD50* being given as 50ng. There is also the difficulty of manufacture, with world annual production being measured in grams rather than tonnes and the teasing fact of its short half-life, 138 days - meaning that the fatal dose was of recent manufacture, a fact which may be very useful for the sleuths. (Deaths from the 1950s involving this substance - accidental poisonings - were hushed up, * LD50 refers to the dose that produces death in half of a...
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