Science and sensation: Poison murder and forensic medicine in nineteenth-century America

"Science and Sensation" addresses the history of forensic science and the place of science and medicine in popular culture. It argues that the forensic sciences, because they figured prominently in celebrated criminal cases and in popular crime narratives, helped shape what science meant for the general public. Poison murder warrants special attention because during the nineteenth century toxicology emerged as the first modern forensic science.;Poisoning was the archetypal secret crime. Administered in private, poison did its work in the interior of the body, leaving no visible signs of violence. The symptoms of poisoning often mimicked those of disease, so determining cause of death was difficult. Prosecutors had to rely on circumstantial evidence, scattered bits of information such as traces of poison, stained clothing, or possible motives. Juries, however, tended to view circumstantial evidence with suspicion, particularly when the trial's most basic fact---that the deceased had died from poison---was uncertain. Science offered a solution to this problem. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, toxicologists developed tests that could isolate minute traces of some poisons in the corpses of murder victims. Where before there had been uncertainty, scientists seemed to produce unequivocal facts.;Detective fiction, a genre that won phenomenal popularity in the 1890s, adopted this optimistic view of forensic science. In the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and his American disciple Arthur B. Reeve, science invariably revealed the truth about poisoning and other crimes. But sensational journalism, in its coverage of real poison murder trials, told a different story. America's adversarial legal system ensured that scientific witnesses would be contradicted by experts representing the opposing side. As millions of newspaper readers learned, the legal process tended to undermine the solidity of scientific facts and the credibility of eminent scientists.;Many historians have argued that in the late nineteenth century popular journalism and fiction reflected and contributed to a steadily rising public enthusiasm for science and medicine. The history of forensic science reveals a more complicated situation, in which the view of science as heroic and unquestionable competed with other accounts that presented it as just another fallible human activity.