Books about Strychnine from Amazon.com

The past comes rearing up to bite the

next generation when a son digs too deep into his family's past....

Martin Firestone can't figure why his father, the eccentric painter Leo Firestone, is throwing a fit. All Martin did was tell his dad he'd been accepted to medical school.

Then, Leo tells Martin a story about his own father, Dr. Samuel Firestone, an extraordinarily gifted doctor and a living legend in the small city of Hobart, NJ, but a man with a serious character flaw. During the summer of 1943, while Leo worked as Samuel's extern, he witnessed some highly questionable behavior. Illegal abortions, supplying heroin to an addict, black-market pharmaceuticals, babies sold to adoptive parents-all in a day's work for Samuel Firestone, M.D.

When Leo decided his father was covering up a murder, he and his girlfriend, stage-struck Harmony, followed a trail of clues into the Fleischmann Scrapyard. There, they ran afoul of old Oscar Fleischmann, Samuel's longtime nemesis. By the time Leo realized he and Harmony were in far over their sixteen-year-old heads, it was too late to call off the investigation.

But there are loose threads in Leo's story. Martin picks them up, and sixty years after the fact, goes snooping in Hobart. And like his father, he comes away with a whole lot more junk than he'd bargained for..
Price: $7.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

I know what your granny did last century, said author Linda Godfrey to the granddaughter of Myrtle Schaude How would you feel if you found out, after years of eating her homemade cookies, that grandma was in truth a confessed, convicted prisoner who served prison time for murder?

This is the true story of petite and mild-mannered Myrtle Schaude, a model wife and mother from Whitewater, Wisconsin, who poisoned her husband with strychnine, then blamed her lover. Next, she started over with a new family in a new state, conveniently forgetting to mention the sordid events that ended her previous marriage. How could Myrtle keep her shocking past a secret over all the decades? Open the book to find out!.
Price: $2.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Encouraged by the medicinal success of quinine, early 19th century scientists hoped strychnine, another plant alkaloid with remarkable properties, might also become a new weapon against disease. Physicians tried for over a century, despite growing evidence to the contrary, to treat everything from paralysis to constipation with it. But strychnine proved only to be disappointingly deadly-relegating its fate almost entirely to animal control, the dangerous adulteration of foods, and criminal exploits. The NOTORIOUS and TRUE story of how a POISONOUS alkaloid... Bitter Nemesis: The Intimate History of Strychnine presents a scholarly and compelling history of this fascinating chemical substance from its discovery to present times. A renowned editor for the Dictionary of Natural Products, Dr. John Buckingham fuses his eclectic interests into an extraordinary mix of original research spanning the realms of history, medicine, literature, chemistry, and forensics. ...Changed the course of HISTORY! Uncovering details and logistics from the earliest experiments performed in an era when proper scientific trials for testing new drugs were still in their infancy, the author explores strychnine's trial-and-error contributions to scientific, medical, and forensic developments. He also investigates historical milestones and the perception of strychnine in popular culture-including criminal notoriety, accidental misuse, and new claims of strychnine's benefits that extend through to the present day. Juxtaposing the real trials, mistrials, and persistent curiosity associated with one of history's most notorious pharmaceutical failures, Bitter Nemesis offers rare insight into the anarchic, yet inspired landscape, practices, and legacy of 19th century science..
Price: $26.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]