Recently I read The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum. I was
originally looking for information on poisons for a possible new mystery novel,
but got caught up in the stories of poisonings, both accidental and deliberate,
and the development of techniques for detecting them—not to mention the story
of Prohibition in New York, and the politics that was inevitably involved along
the way.
It was a very good book,
but there was nonetheless something sort of creepy about reading an interesting
story about a poisoning and remembering, suddenly, this really happened. Mary Frances Creighton really did kill first
her brother, then a friend, with arsenic. A group of three people really did take
out insurance on an old drunk, and then kill him with carbon monoxide after
several attempts to kill him in other ways failed. Some people—too many—really are capable of doing evil things.
This brought to mind an
incident from years ago, in college. Our class had been assigned a reading on
pornography by someone whose name I have now forgotten. She described in
impassioned terms some incredibly degrading images and corresponding attitudes
toward women. Seriously, to say that these people were treating women as objects fails to recognize how much more
carefully and gently we treat most of our inanimate possessions. It was
extreme.
A number of us were
sitting on the steps outside, waiting for class. One young woman started
talking about the article, basically saying that it had seemed kind of
over-the-top to her. “Who really thinks like that? None of the men I know,” she said.
An older student in the
class, a soft-spoken man in his late twenties or thirties, heard her. “I’ve
known men like that,” he told her. “They’re out there. Believe me.” I think everyone
went quiet for a while after that.
So now I’m thinking maybe
I should read about people who do
horrible things, if only to remind myself that some people are capable of
knowingly and willingly inflicting terrible suffering on others. I do read about terrible things in the newspaper, but there’s a difference between reading about, say, dictators, who deal in evil on a scale that’s hard to comprehend
(and often dealt out through intermediaries), and reading about quite ordinary
individuals carrying out quite specific and describable crimes.
I’ve been lucky enough
not to have had to deal with anyone really evil. Even people who are merely
very unpleasant have generally been on the fringes of my life, not a daily part
of it. As a result, perhaps, I tend to look for a charitable explanation for
people’s actions.
Often this is a good
thing. But as the cases in The Poisoner’s
Handbook show, sometimes there’s no room to wonder whether a person’s
intentions were misunderstood or their actions excusable. Killing someone for
insurance money makes one's attitude toward other people quite clear.
Sometimes, people really are just that
bad.
It’s something to keep in
mind.
Till next post.
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