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Poison: A History and a Family Memoir
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Poison: A History and a Family Memoir Hardcover - 2002

by Gail Bell


From the publisher

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.

First line

WHEN I WAS A GIRL of ten my father showed me a kind of sample case, made, he said, of the best wood, lacquered, embossed with gold initials, hinged and fastened with brass.

Details

  • Title Poison: A History and a Family Memoir
  • Author Gail Bell
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First edition
  • Pages 276
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher St. Martin's Press, Gordonsville, Virginia, U.S.A.
  • Date October 11, 2002
  • ISBN 9780312306793 / 0312306792
  • Weight 0.98 lbs (0.44 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.86 x 6.18 x 0.96 in (22.50 x 15.70 x 2.44 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Murderers - Great Britain, Macbeth, William
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2002512718
  • Dewey Decimal Code 364.152

About the author

Gail Bell was born in Sydney, Australia in 1950. A graduate of the University of Sydney, where she studied pharmacy and education, she has since written award-winning short stories, travel journalism, and many thousands of words about medicines and poisons. This is her first full-length work of non-fiction.
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Poison: A History and a Family Memoir
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Poison: A History and a Family Memoir
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Poison: A History and a Family Memoir

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