This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Neurology  • Bioterrorism  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

By Ian Burney.
224 pp, $59.95.
Manchester, England: Manchester University Press; 2006.
ISBN-13 978-0719073762.

JAMA. 2008;299(5):582-583.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In the Victorian imagination, murder by stealth through the administration of lethal poisons was associated with the dark intrigues of the Borgias. However, the famous social commentators and historians of mid 19th-century England, Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay, suggested that the 16th-century Italian way of homicide had become an English epidemic that marked the decline of British civilization. Ian Burney's gripping volume analyses why homicide by poisoning assumed a significant role in Victorian England's popular and learned cultures and investigates the attempts by scientific, medical, and legal reformers to apply new systematic methods of detection and proof to reduce the crime wave. In the process, Burney manages to transform a subject that promises to be limitlessly dull, ie, the history of toxicology, into a fascinating story that offers highly original insight into Victorian society's cultural doubt about its own stability.

Carlyle and Macaulay point out that until the early . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Dorothy Porter, PhD, Reviewer
Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine
University of California, San Francisco
porterd@dahsm.ucsf.edu

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?