Poison: A History and a Family Memoir [Hardcover]

Gail Bell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312306792 | ISBN-13: 978-0312306793 | Publication Date: October 11, 2002 | Edition: 1st

Years after Dr. William Macbeth died, his ornate medicine case passed to his estranged son. Over the protests of his family, the son buried it deep in the ground, out of sight and out of reach.

Then ten-years-old, Macbeth's granddaughter Gail Bell watched the mysterious case of elixirs arrive at her home. She watched her father treat it like a poison chalice. Only decades later would she understand why: the case concealed evidence of her family's deadly secret.

In 1927, Macbeth was accused of poisoning two of his sons. He never stood trial. Bell, determined to discover how this "calm, warm, and caring" healer could become a cunning murderer-and evade detection-eventually uncovered the dark secrets that her father had tried to hide from the world. But as the unexpected twists of her investigation reveal, nothing is as straightforward as it seems.

At the same time, she explores what the crime of poisoning reveals about humanity, through the perspectives of myth, history, fiction, and the great poison trials. A pharmacist by profession, and the granddaughter of a suspected poisoner by circumstance, she is perfectly placed to revisit the cases of Cleopatra, Emma Bovary, Napoleon's doctor, Harold Shipman, and Dr. Crippen, and she is equally well-suited to chronicle the devastating effects of poison's many forms, from hemlock and belladonna to arsenic and strychnine.

Poison is at once a fascinating history of the science and sociology of poisoning, and a true, first-person account of one woman's struggle to understand its mysterious role in her own family's murderous history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers with a strong stomach will enjoy this unusual memoir laced with a natural history of poison. The author, an Australian journalist, short story writer and pharmacist, has both a professional and personal interest in her subject. From family gossip, Bell learned that her paternal grandfather, William Macbeth, deliberately poisoned two of his sons. He and his wife divorced after this dark deed, and Macbeth, an herbalist and chemist, continued to practice his trade. The author's interviews with her great-aunt revealed that her grandmother was reluctant to accuse Macbeth out of fear for their two remaining sons. Bell's exhaustive investigation of this family secret and her effort "to see the man in the monster" leaves her, finally, with a version of events that differs sharply from her great-aunt's recollections. Along the way, she offers scientific details on many types of poison and a series of engrossing but graphic and unsettling accounts of legendary poisonings, both real and literary, murderous and suicidal. Included is Flaubert's horrific description of Madame Bovary's death; the case of Mary Anne McConkey, who was hung in Dublin in 1841 for sprinkling her husband's lunch with aconite, which killed him in three torturous hours; and a 20th-century man who accidentally murdered his love interest by giving her what he thought was an aphrodisiac-Spanish fly.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

We can find poisons in history with Socrates and hemlock, in literature with Madame Bovary and arsenic, and in a modern news report with an execution by lethal injection. But do we know where poisons come from and how they work? At the same time, there are poisons that are nontoxic and nonchemical but equally deadly; these are in the lies or half-truths that are passed down within a family. Bell, an Australian pharmacist, was prompted by an odious poisoning story within her own family over 75 years ago to begin a detective story that spans a decade. The result of her expert and determined sleuthing is a factual account of this past event, one that rewrites family history with truth. Chapters on her detective work alternate with chapters that trace a multitude of poisons through history, myth, paintings, and literature. Bell tells us where these substances come from, how they are administered, how they poison, etc. The writing is lucid and fascinating. Readers will enjoy Bell's personal saga, her scientific and historical facts, and the resolution. Highly recommended for all collections. Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences Inc., RTP, Raleigh, NC
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (October 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312306792
• ISBN-13: 978-0312306793
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,375,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Macabre Treat, May 20, 2003

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poison: A History and a Family Memoir (Hardcover)

In _Poison: A History and Family Memoir_ (St. Martin's Press), Australian pharmacologist Gail Bell has investigated a ghoulish family scandal. She had heard how her horrid grandfather, Dr. William Macbeth, poisoned two of his sons. She determined that she would get the facts. There was no one in her family who had first hand experience of Dr. Macbeth except her great-aunt Rose. From her, Bell did get the facts, or at least enough of them to provoke further enquiry. The facts become as plain as they can be (not very plain, but surprising facts, nonetheless) by the end of the book, but that is only partially the book's point. For the most part, it is a series of handsome digressions about the history, literature, and celebrities of poisoning.

Bell's grandfather ("the one we never spoke about") died before she was born. Rose's ghastly story was supplemented by the report of a narrative that Macbeth fancied Rose until he married Rose's sister. By the time it came to do research, all the participants were dead. What solutions arrived came from persistence, luck, newspaper clippings, death certificates, and bureaucratic files. But most of the pages here do not have to do with solving the case, which is merely an excuse (a good one) for a book of essays on aspects of poisons and poisoners. "The underlying narrative in all poison murder stories is a betrayal of trust," Bell reminds us. There are many stories of poisoners here, and the punishments meted out to those who were discovered. The particular role of females is examined, as is the folklore regarding snakebite. Along with anecdotes of famous, infamous, and nameless poisoners, there are tales of antidotes. The Australian blue-ringed octopus exudes a toxin for which there is no antidote, but there are antidotes for all the others, although they are not necessarily specific or effective.

The death by hemlock of Socrates is examined when Bell looks at Jacques-Louis David's painting of the subject and can't take her eyes off the cup. She notes that this is a non-Socratic reaction which reflects her life of pharmacological study "... and puts me in the category of the pedant who can't see past her own learning." Madam Bovary's self-inflicted death is here, and Cleopatra, Juliet, Van Gogh, Eva Braun, and many more. There is hemlock, sure, but belladonna, arsenic, Spanish fly, carbon monoxide, and others from the wealth of poisons are described here, along with sometimes grisly details about how each throws a spanner into the biochemical or organic gears that we need to keep ourselves going. Horses get arsenic because it gives their coats a shine, but eating arsenic has been a family hobby, too. Pigeons are almost immune to the effects of opium. The FDA continues to have to warn that mandrake and other roots and plants are better at killing people than they are at sexually stimulating them. There is nothing morbid in the many facts and stories here, but much macabre. Bell does tie everything together with a satisfying twist at the end. Her scholarly and entertaining miscellany ought to be examined at leisure with good cups of cocoa nearby. Be careful who makes them for you.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Occasionally fascinating, but cluttered and disorganized, August 5, 2004

By 

J. D. Ripper (Athens, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poison: A History and a Family Memoir (Hardcover)

This work is really two books. The first is an account of the alleged poisoning death of her two cousins in 1927 by their father and the second is a history of poison and poisoning told using literary, historical, and toxicological examples. These disparate works are never really blended and there are no transitions between the two topics. Several times the author literally seems to forget about the family poison story and spends several chapters on unrelated topics. This made the book difficult to read.

There are some fascinating tidbits on poison in this book [copper arsenite was used to color wallpaper designs green and was mixed with starch, applied to fabic, dried and polished to make a passable substitute for silk that killed a woman who wore a green ball gown made of this stuff] but there is nothing really new here. Bell reviews the standard poison cases [Crippen, Palmer, Lamson, Young, Swango, Shipman] that are in most true crime reference books and the family poisoning story that sounded so intriguing at first devolved into a gossipy, frequently-incorrect account [only one of the two boys suspected of being poisoned was killed by poison]. The literary and antropological sections concerning poison myths and portrayls of poisonings were also interesting.

Overall, this book is just too chaotic and cluttered.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars capable, occasionally lyrical memoir, September 13, 2005

By 

ivyunbound (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poison: A History and a Family Memoir (Hardcover)

My rating of this book may not be fair as I came to it more interested in poisons than in the story of Bell's family.
So, it's with an acknowledged bias that I say that I think this book is at its best in its presentation of actual case studies and poison history. It's a pleasure to read the author's take on even the most familiar elements of poison lore because of the freshness and literacy she brings to the telling. She weaves together unexpected sources but is always delightfully aware of the personal and historic contexts of the sources. I particularly enjoyed the fact that she treated her own presence as narrator and author with the same degree of honesty.
That said, I can't say that I found her family's story particularly compelling, largely because there is just so little information. Bell addresses this repeatedly but I often found her speculations about the past unsatisfying and redundant. She also tries to fill the gaps with her own thoughts about poisoning, history, death, etc. Some of these are beautiful and surprising, but many just feel self-indulgent.
I should also point out that Bell never really lets up on the metaphors and similes. It gets to be a bit much.
Also, I found her treatment of her great-aunt Rose hypocritical and a little odd. Though she seems ready, if not eager, to use the lack of evidence to exonerate or at least raise questions about her grandfather's guilt, she seems awfully ready to make harsh judgements about her great-aunt based on very little information. Could it be that Bell herself falls prey to our desire for a villain in every story?
Still, an enjoyable read and a welcome break from the usual poison literature.